Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, February 12th, 2025.

Today's poem is by W.H. Auden, and it's called The Nightmail, or alternatively, nightmare,

or sometimes known by its first line,

this is the Nightmail. It was written by Auden specifically for use in a 1936 documentary,

British documentary film entitled Nightmail, about the nightly train operated by the British Postal Service that ran from London to Scotland.

The documentary is brief, just about 25 minutes, and lived on long after its original production as this great beloved and nostalgia-inducing

piece of British cinematic history. And one of the high points is the verse narration

that Auden wrote to accompany a portion of the film, and that is what you are going

to hear today.

It's very reminiscent of the poem from yesterday's episode, Robert Louis Stevenson's,

from a railway carriage, in that it too is constructed to mimic and evoke the sounds and movements of a train, a rail-ray car,

not only in the content that it includes or the scenes that it describes,

but in the way the rhythm of the language itself fits together.

This poem has two kinds of stanzas. There are some longer sections that are

structured largely with these trokeys and anapest, this alternating rhythmic foot to give you

this stress, unstress, stress, unstress, stress, unstress,

kind of pattern, which gives you a kind of chug-a-chug-chug-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-chch-chchch-chch-chchchchchchchch-ch-rhythm. bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum and you can feel in places of the text of the poem

picking up speed as the train itself works up this head of steam there are some great analogies

or figurative language in these sections as well at one point odden asks us to picture the train

throwing or shoveling steam over her shoulder, which is a great image.

And then in the shorter sections, the meter relaxes, the rhythm relaxes, and we get this narration or commentary, and then we return to the journey, as it were, before the poem concludes

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