Progress: "England Lies Lost To Silence Now"

I cannot gainsay the importance of freeways and motorways and expressways to the felicity of our Modern World.  I have driven the length and breadth of the U.S.A. on more than one occasion, and there is nothing finer than travelling beneath a huge sky on Interstate 40 out in the Texas Panhandle, heading toward Albuquerque -- particularly if you are listening to Gram Parsons sing "Return of the Grievous Angel" with Emmylou Harris.

And yet, one wonders . . . I have seen, high up on the Great Divide in Wyoming, the remnants of wagon wheel ruts on the Oregon Trail.  And I have seen, just off the Natchez Trace Parkway near the Mississippi River, the sunken, shadowy trail beneath the trees that marks the old Natchez Trace.  In both places you could hear a pin drop.

                      Bridges

The arteries, red lane on lane,
   Cover the engineers' new maps:
England lies lost to silence now:
   On bridges, where old roads cross
The chasm of the new, the idlers
   Stand staring down.  Philosophers
Of the common run, some masticate pipe-stems,
   And seem not to hear the roar in Albion's veins,
As though the quiet, rebegotten as they lean, survived
   Through them alone, its stewards and sustainers,
For all these advancing and disappearing lives.

Charles Tomlinson, The Way In and Other Poems (1974).

                 

                    Winifred McKenzie (1905-2001), "The Tree" (1990)

Trains In The Distance At Night: Siegfried Sassoon, Marcel Proust, And Emmylou Harris

I hold romantic notions about the sound of distant trains in the countryside at night.  Perhaps this is due to the fact that I am a city dweller.  Or perhaps it has something to do with country music -- Emmylou Harris singing "Tulsa Queen," for instance.

Siegfried Sassoon wrote the following poem near the beginning of the Second World War:

                    A Local Train of Thought

Alone, in silence, at a certain time of night,
Listening, and looking up from what I'm trying to write,
I hear a local train along the Valley.  And "There
Goes the one-fifty," think I to myself; aware
That somehow its habitual travelling comforts me,
Making my world seem safer, homelier, sure to be
The same to-morrow; and the same, one hopes, next year.
"There's peacetime in that train."  One hears it disappear
With needless warning whistle and rail-resounding wheels.
"That train's quite like an old familiar friend," one feels.

Siegfried Sassoon, Rhymed Ruminations (1940).

 

                                 Claughton Pellew, "The Train" (1920)

I would ask myself what time it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now further off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in the forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller is hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that still echo in his ears amid the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home again.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; translation revised by D. J. Enright) (1913).

                               Eric Ravilious, "Train Landscape" (1939)