York, England is home to the National Railway Museum, celebrating the history of rail travel, mostly in Britain but also beyond (they have a Japanese bullet train on display, among other non-British trains). We’re not talking about model trains … these are actual railway cars and engines, all housed under one roof next to the railway station in York.

We’ll begin our visit there today with a little Train Karaoke. No, really, that’s what the kids display called it. It’s about a poem by W.H. Auden called Night Mail, written for a 1936 documentary by the same name, about the National Postal System’s use of the train system to deliver the mail. In the documentary, the narrator (who I think was the movie’s director, John Grierson), recites the poem in a way that mimics the rhythm of trains on the rails. The rhythm gets faster and faster as the poem goes along, until the train reaches its destination, and the poem slows to a finish. Quite remarkable. Click here to see the complete clip from the documentary.

I’ve also put the poem below. The idea of the “karaoke” display at the museum  for this was to allow you to record yourself reciting the poem, to see if you could match Grierson’s speed and rhythm. He doesn’t make it sound easy … and it’s even harder than he makes it sound.

Night Mail
by W. H. Auden

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.

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 black-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs 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 lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and 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 from 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 outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and 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?