The Poetry of Trains

The mythology of the Train, the Railroad, those two shiny tracks running off into the far distance is a powerful symbol of the industrial age.The train was the first mass transit system to network the land and to carry people and materials of every class and of every shape. A sort of democracy with the only requirement of use being the price of a ticket.Poets who grew up with this pulsating leviathan of industry were quick to see its merits for their own lines and verse. Across these poems comes both an individual eye across a wide range of feelings, thoughts and ideas as well as, occasionally, the trainspotter’s delight for form and detail from poets such as Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, Edna St Vincent Millay, Damon Runyon and a host of others.1 - The Poetry of Trains - An Introduction2 - A Song of the Rails by Damon Runyon3 - Song of a Train by John Davidson4 - Song of the Rail by Ella Wheeler Wilcox5 - Rhyme of the Rail by John Godfrey Saxe6 - Up the Line by Will Carleton7 - From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson8 - An Incident in a Railroad Car by Jamers Russell Lowell9 - Railway Times by Martin Faraquar Tupper10 - On the Engine by Night by Alexander Anderson11 - The Night Journey by Rupert Brooke12 - Travel by Edna St Vincent Millay13 - Train Ride by Federico Garcia Lorca14 - The Train by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge15 - Homeward Ho! by Ada A Mosher16 - The Rail Road by James Very17 - The Railway Train by Emily Dickinson18 - In the Train by James Thomson19 - The Division Superintendent by Ambrose Bierce20 - The Word of an Engineer by James Weldon Johnson21 - The Train Among the Hills by Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts22 - The Gospel Train. Transcribed by Christine Rutledge of the Carolina Singers 187323 - The Jaffa and Jerusalem Railway by Eugene Field24 - In the Train and At Versailles by Dante Gabriel Rossetti25 - The Ledbury Train by Radclyffe Hall26 - Adlestrop by Edward Thomas27 - The Ancient Arteries of America by Daniel Sheehan28 - Subway Wind by Claude McKay29 - In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound30 - Railway Rhymes by C L Graves31 - What's the Railroad to Me by Henry David Thoreau32 - The Railway Station by Archibald Lampman33 - Thompson's Lunch Room, Grand Central Station by Amy Lowell34 - Faintheart in a Railway Train by Thomas Hardy35 - Song O' the Lost Trains by Damon Runyon36 - The Phantom Train by Tom Hood37 - One of the Unfair Sex by Ambrose Bierce38 - September 1st. 1802 by William Wordsworth39 - Autumn in the Garden by Fredegond Shove40 - A Winter Day - Noon and Afternoon by Thomas Aird41 - In the Train by Sara Teasdale42 - To a Locomotive in Winter by Walt Whitman43 - On the Departure Platform by Thomas Hardy44 - Guild Signal by Bret Harte45 - The Send Off by Wilfred Owen