In the 1930s, a group of British filmmakers, led by John Grierson, under the aegis of the GPO Film Unit, was behind an influential output of documentary films that became known as the British Documentary Film Movement. Of the films it produced, the best known and most critically acclaimed was Harry Watt’s and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936), featuring music by Benjamin Britten and poetry by W H Auden. Auden wrote his poem especially for the documentary, which follows the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland. The poem acts as a sort of verse commentary over the footage of the steam locomotive, and helped to establish the documentary as something of a classic.
Auden’s language is ingenious; glorious use of metaphor and clever rhymes, four-beat lines rhythmically delivered to mimic the pumping of the rods and pistons of the locomotive. You can almost hear the train chugging along. The personified train is efficient, reliable, steadfast, trustworthy – there is a remit, after all, to sell the merits of the postal service, and Auden satisfies the spec. As the pace picks up to match the acceleration of the train, the rhymes become quick and punchy, and become internal rhymes (Letters of thanks, letters from banks) rather than line-end rhymes; a rapper’s delight.
And read along here:
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, 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 bushes at her blank-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 a bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside 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 to 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 on 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 the Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But 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?
