Fetters Setters ~ Contact Us

Night Mail ~ by W. H. Auden

2009-01-14T18:45:00.000-05:00

Image: The Fast Mail Train ~ Engine No. 110 ~

from Harper's Weekly, November 27th, 1877

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

.

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,

Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,

The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:

The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Thro' sparse counties she rampages,

Her driver's eye upon the gauges.

Panting up past lonely farms

Fed by the fireman's restless arms

Striding forward along the rails

Thro' southern uplands

With northern mails.
Winding up the valley to the watershed,

Thro' the heather and the weather

And the dawn overhead.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder

Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes

Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads

As she approaches,

Stare from the bushes

At her blank-faced coaches.

Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;

They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,

But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, the climb is done.

Down towards Glasgow

She descends

Towards the steam tugs

Yelping down the glade of cranes,

Towards the fields of

Apparatus, the furnaces

Set on the dark plain

Like gigantic chessmen.

All Scotland waits for her:

In the dark glens,

Beside the pale-green sea lochs

Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,

Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,

Receipted bills and invitations

To inspect new stock or visit relations,

And applications for situations

And timid lovers' declarations

And gossip,

Gossip from all the nations,

News circumstantial,

News financial,

Letters with

Holiday snaps to enlarge in,

Letters with faces

Scrawled in the margin,

Letters from uncles,

Cousins, and aunts,

Letters to Scotland

Fom the South of France,

Letters of condolence

To Highlands and Lowlands

Notes from overseas to Hebrides

Written on paper of every hue,

The pink, the violet,

The white and the blue,

The chatty, the catty,

The boring, adoring,

The cold and official

And the heart's outpouring,

Clever, stupid, short and long,

The typed and the printed

And the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep

Dreaming of terrifying monsters,

Or of friendly tea beside the band

At Cranston's or Crawford's:

Asleep in working Glasgow,

Asleep in well-set Edinburgh,

Asleep in granite Aberdeen,

They continue their dreams,

And shall wake soon and long for letters,

And none will hear the postman's knock

Without a quickening of the heart,

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?