The poem From a Railway Carriage appeared in Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection A Child’s Garden of Verses, published in 1885.
From their very beginning, railways seem to have inspired more poems than any other form of transport. The fleeting glimpse of something seen from a train window then gone forever features in quite a lot of them.
The first verse here captures that familiar sensation of the landscape moving while the passenger stays still. It’s worth remembering that when this poem was published, a train journey was the only experience of travelling at speed that was available to the ordinary person.
The fast-paced rhythm captures the speed of the train. A similar rhythm was used by W H Auden for the later and more famous Night Mail. The poet Christopher Reid has suggested that Auden might have been influenced by Stevenson’s poem.
Railway journeys are rich in metaphorical possibilities for the poet. We use the metaphor of life as a journey all the time now. Perhaps that has its origin in railway poems.
From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!
The Good Reader 