The Trains
The Trains - meaning Summary
War and Rural Disruption
The Trains portrays wartime intrusion into rural life through the nightly passage of armed trains. Their thunderous movement shatters orchard quiet, wakes children, and stirs a primitive, remembered violence symbolized by a tiger. The poem links bodily memory and communal history, suggesting that inherited blood ties keep people bound to cycles of conflict. The trains' animal cries and the reeking trail they leave dramatize how military mobilization disturbs domestic landscapes and dreams.
Read Complete AnalysesTunnelling through the night, the trains pass in a splendour of power, with a sound like thunder shaking the orchards, waking the young from a dream, scattering like glass the old mens' sleep, laying a black trail over the still bloom of the orchards; the trains go north with guns. Strange primitive piece of flesh, the heart laid quiet hearing their cry pierce through its thin-walled cave recalls the forgotten tiger, and leaps awake in its old panic riot; and how shall mind be sober, since blood's red thread still binds us fast in history? Tiger, you walk through all our past and future, troubling the children's sleep'; laying a reeking trail across our dreams of orchards. Racing on iron errands, the trains go by, and over the white acres of our orchards hurl their wild summoning cry, their animal cry.... the trains go north with guns.
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