Some thoughts on ‘Travel’ by Edna St Vincent Millay

Today is a day of heavy rain driven by fierce winds: England in July. I turned my back on it all and escaped into browsing poetry. I found the perfect getaway vehicle in ‘Travel’ by Edna St Vincent Millay.

Both the poem and the poet were new to me but the need at the poem’s heart is familiar and persistent. Here’s the poem:

‘Travel’ by Edna St Vincent Millay

The railroad track is miles away,
  And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
  But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn’t a train goes by,
  Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
  And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with the friends I make,
  And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take
  No matter where it’s going.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950) was an American lyrical poet and playwright. She won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her poem “Ballad of the Harp-Weaver“; she was the first woman and second person to win the award. In 1943, Millay was the sixth person and the second woman to be awarded the Frost Medal for her lifetime contribution to American poetry.

She was a renowned social figure and noted feminist in New York City from the 1920s onwards.

What calls to me about this poem is that the need to travel that she describes doesn’t come from a dissatisfaction with where she is or who she’s with. It’s not a need to escape. It’s a constant background awareness of possibility, strengthened by a hunger for… well… difference. novelty, freedom, the joy of the journey. It’s the travelling that’s the point, not the destination. For her, trains embody the spirit of travel: the freedom to move through rather than be part of a place. The trains she hears even when she should be asleep, steam and shriek their way through the landscape, powered by a relentless, purposeful energy focused on motion.

At its best, perhaps its idealised in retrospect best, travel can be like this.

My wife and I have always travelled. When we imagined retirement together, having the time to travel slowly and far was at the heart of it. When the time came, in 2018, reality got in the way. I’ve been unconsciously listening to the sound of trains screaming and steaming for five long years now and with every month, my need to travel grew.

The first year of being back in the UK was OK. We were newly returned and settling in. Then COVID hit and the world changed and we were glad to have a safe and comfortable home to wait things out in, even if we largely had to wait alone. When we raised our heads, my government had taken away our freedom of movement, making travel across Europe as complicated as it was when I was young.

We decided to visit other parts of Britain, especially the parts that we hadn’t seen in decades.

It wasn’t enough.

We needed, well, to be somewhere else. To hear other languages spoken, to taste other food, to drink other wines, to see horizons other than our own.

Finally, last month, we made it off the island. It was a short trip, by train and boat, to Brittany. But it was travel. It was motion. It was a reconnection to the larger, ever-changing world beyond our shores.

But, when I close my eyes in the dead hours of the night, knowing that sleep will elude me for a while, I can hear travel calling to me like a train whistle and I know I’ll be heading away again soon.

Postcript: my memory failed me.

You know those genial souls that you can tell the same joke to time after time and it still works because they never remember the punchline? Well, it seems that I’m like that with poetry.

When my wife read this post, she asked why I was saying I hadn’t read this poem before when I’d written about it already? I knew that she was mistaken. Right up to the point where she showed me my own post on my own blog.

If you’d like to read what I thought of this poem the first time three years ago, go here: The Travel Itch and Edna St Vincent Millay’s Poetry