Rain, Steam, and Speed

PERHAPS we look for our poets in the wrong places. Or perhaps our poets have not the right sort of education.

There was a short news item the other day that told of a genuine poet — at least a man with the right sort of soul to be one. Probably he never left a line of verse. And no doubt much of the lovely language, the epicurean taste for the exact flavor of a word, was beyond his experience. The only document he left that I know of was a will. I have not read even that. No doubt it had many pompous legal terms — a lawyer or a trust officer would see to that.

But amid the mass of commonplace bequests there was a request that the ashes of the deceased be scattered along the right of way of the Pennsylvania Railroad near Harrisburg. For the man had been a locomotive engineer on that division.

There is a school of thought that would put this man down as a robot, so chained to the machine that he had no life apart from it. He would be counted among the tragedies produced by an industrial civilization. No doubt his intellectual interests were narrow, and his artistic tastes deplorable. His favorite piece of literature may well have been ‘Casey Jones, the Brave Engineer.’

The very fact that a man is a locomotive engineer proves that he has spent most of his life on the railroad. Unlike a President of the United States, he must undergo long training to prove his fitness. He is also a kind of artist. Automatic signals and safety devices may cause the art to decline like so many others, but the writer of this testament belonged to the great tradition. When he served his apprenticeship at the fire door, there were no automatic stokers. An air hole in his fire meant loss of steam pressure, and curses from the engineer. He had to learn to recognize that trouble by ear as well as eye.

When he finally graduated to the cab, there was no row of colored lights inside, like those on a department store elevator. Through smoke or fog he had to pick out of the night just which of the flickering oil lanterns were his signals.

Narrow he may have been, but he was no robot. A bit ago I called him a poet, or, rather, a man with the soul of a poet. I believe he was. For his last wish is more than the mark of a man merely skillful in handling an air brake, or spotting a red lantern. I cannot, for instance, imagine an employee in the Ford plant writing such a will.

I believe that the old man was thinking not only in terms of machinery, although he must have had some understanding of its poetry. The rhythm of a well-tuned machine, the split-second timing of valves set just right, must have been in his blood. It is that sense of rhythm that enables the engineer to gauge the speed of a train, even when he is riding in the coach as a passenger. And rhythm is no small part of poetry, some of our modern poets to the contrary notwithstanding.

But this engineer wanted his ashes scattered along the right of way where it runs through the Pennsylvania ‘Dutch’ farming country. On his division he had for years watched the rolling hills turn green, the neat fields ripen into harvests; had seen the regular shocks of corn silhouetted against the autumn woods. We can judge his taste by the place he picked. The Viking went flaming back to the sea. This man chose the green earth that he knew. The human desire is in both cases the same — a pantheistic wish to be one with nature, ‘rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.’

But he was also a child of his age. It was not ‘the blessed mutter of the mass’ for which his spirit yearned, but the rhythm of the drivers, of iron wheels on iron rails. And the whistle of old No. 10 echoing through the hills at night. No doubt he knew many of the locomotives by their voices alone.

In the old man’s mind, along with pictures of landscape, there must have been those of ‘the road.’ He must have felt once more the wind and rain in his face as he leaned from the cab. He must have remembered the shaft of fire piercing the backflung curtain of smoke and steam as the fire door was opened at night. Once more he felt the bitter wind that almost swept him from the swaying cars when as a young brakeman he had walked them with a sure step; the sweltering heat of midsummer and of the blazing coal when he had advanced to the job of firing. These were not the floggings of fate; they were the battles in which a young man won his spurs.

He was no Miniver Cheevy who

He accepted the machines, the smoke and dirt, as the eighteenth-century poets and novelists accepted the filth of the London they loved. It is not the environment that counts here, but the poet. Such men are big enough to seize joy from a stubborn world.

One day one of his kind will pause long enough to write the true poetry of this age.

ERNEST EARNEST