Overture to a Dance of Locomotives
Overture to a Dance of Locomotives - meaning Summary
Train Station as Ritual
The poem presents a crowded train station as a ritualized, mechanical choreography. Voices announcing destinations, porters, clocks, whistles and moving sunlight create a tense orchestration that alternates urgency and suspension. Trains and passengers become parts of a repeated, almost inevitable dance where time, motion and human bustle converge. The closing lines insist on the pattern’s certainty: wheels, rails and schedules keep returning, sustaining the dance.
Read Complete AnalysesMen with picked voices chant the names of cities in a huge gallery: promises that pull through descending stairways to a deep rumbling. The rubbing feet of those coming to be carried quicken a grey pavement into soft light that rocks to and fro, under the domed ceiling, across and across from pale earthcolored walls of bare limestone. Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever. A leaning pyramid of sunlight, narrowing out at a high window, moves by the clock: disaccordant hands straining out from a center: inevitable postures infinitely repeated-- two--twofour--twoeight! Porters in red hats run on narrow platforms. This way ma'am! --important not to take the wrong train! Lights from the concrete ceiling hang crooked but-- Poised horizontal on glittering parallels the dingy cylinders packed with a warm glow--inviting entry-- pull against the hour. But brakes can hold a fixed posture till-- The whistle! Not twoeight. Not twofour. Two! Gliding windows. Colored cooks sweating in a small kitchen. Taillights-- In time: twofour! In time: twoeight! --rivers are tunneled: trestles cross oozy swampland: wheels repeating the same gesture remain relatively stationary: rails forever parallel return on themselves infinitely. The dance is sure.
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