travel by edna st. vincent

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Love is not all (sonnet xxx), sonnet iii: “mindful of you the sodden earth in spring”.

Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,     And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,     And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing The summer through, and each departing wing,     And all the nests that the bared branches show,     And all winds that in any weather blow,

Just a rainy day or two In a windy tower, That was all I had of you— Saving half an hour.

Marred by greeting passing groups In a cinder walk, Near some naked blackberry hoops Dim with purple chalk.

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• 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 friends I make, And better friends I’ll not be knowing; Yet there isn’t a train I’d rather take, No matter where it’s going.

Analysis, meaning and summary of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem Travel

i see it as if the persona is trapped and wants to get out, she would take any train anywhere she could to get out. Also the persona cannot stop thinking about the train because they cannot stop thinking or wishing of how to get out. That is how i interpreted it.

I read this poem as adventurous, like she was wanting to get out and she would go anywhere the train took her

One further comment: When my wife and I moved to St. Louis from Oberlin so that I could do grad. work in Political Science at Washington University I found an apartment at 5877 Nina Place, St. Louis 12 (pre-zipcode). The mainline of the Wabash ran in a cutting right behind our apartment. I could watch many great trains, including The Wabash Cannonball and The Detroit Limited. We used both trains to get home to Michigan. We got off at Adrian. But enough! Millay again for sure.

The mainline of the Michigan Central ran right back of my high school. Every school day I heard The Wolverine (#17) go to Chicago from New York, The Michigan (#355) go to Chicago from Detroit. About the time school dismissed The New York Special (#44) went by from Chicago to New York. You can hear that train called out in Hitchcock’s “North By Northwest.” We cheered when we heard “Jackson” at the Michigan Theatre in the old hometown (where we still live). So, I like the poem because it’s about friends and trains and wishing I were on my way to the Windy City rather than in Chemistry Class. One can get rather too deep about literature! I am posting this from Houston, TX. I came here on what’s left of The Wolverine service and on The Texas Eagle (bus from Longview to Houston). We live in degraded times! No cinders, no steam, and a BUS to finish the journey. Good grief!

I do feel a love of Trains and the sheer magic of Train Travel. I think the sadness may come from not a lack of personal fulfillment but from simply missing travelling on the train. Perhaps you have to be a train travel enthusiast to feel this.

I’ve always seen the poem as more hopeful than that–that the narrarator wants to take every opportunity to follow there dreams, I never saw it as a sort of resigned, given-up-on-dreams feeling. That’s interesting.

This poem always gives me the incredible feeling that the narrator feels as though they have missed out on their dreams. Now they are stuck, content, but stuck and their forgotten and missed dreams are manifest in the form of an imaginary train that never comes.

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Analysis: “Travel”

The speaker narrates “Travel” from a first-person perspective and explores their relationship with place , as well as their inability to explore beyond one’s locality. The speaker’s identity is ambiguous—they have no name, no age, no gender, and no defined location. Based on the speaker’s inaccessibility to the train , as well as their focus on connections to community and friendship, one can infer the speaker is not male, especially with the restrictions on and expectations placed on women in the early-20th century. The speaker may be of no gender at all. The speaker does not appear to be a historical figure and is speaking from their present moment, which is held in the abstract. The choice of speaker ambiguity may be intentional on Millay’s part. It creates limitations and distance for the speaker without explicitly attaching to gender. The obscured or opaque identity also coincides with the existential questions many in the Lost Generation had about their home locale, purpose, and value system.

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Analysis of Travel

Edna st. vincent millay 1892 (rockland) – 1950 (austerlitz).

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 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.

Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 03, 2023

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her feminist activism  more…

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Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950) was a poet and playwright and the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize. She began publishing poems while still in high school and earned a full scholarship to Vassar based largely on a single poem, called "Renascence." Part of a prominent group of artists and writers who lived in Greenwich Village, Millay was as famous for her bohemian lifestyle as for her writing. She spent the last half of her life entertaining fellow artists with her husband at Steepletop, their pastoral New York estate, which is now a National Historic Landmark.

  by: Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

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.,    more poems by edna st. vincent millay.

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.

This Poem Features In:

• poems about travelling on the railroad

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The Amplifier

St. vincent’s 10 (or, actually 11) essential songs.

Sample her seven daring and eclectic albums as her latest, “All Born Screaming,” arrives.

By Lindsay Zoladz

Dear listeners,

One afternoon in late February, my editor Caryn asked if I might be interested in profiling St. Vincent ahead of her new album “All Born Screaming.” I said that I probably wasn’t — though I have long been a fan, my early spring schedule was quite full and the reporting would require a short-notice trip to Los Angeles — but that I would give the album a spin on the way home from work, just to see if it would change my mind. By the fourth track, I was searching flights to L.A.

I’m so glad I took that assignment . Annie Clark (St. Vincent’s real name) was generous with her time and her explanations of her creative process, and I came away with a new appreciation of her work ethic. An accomplished songwriter, guitarist and producer, Clark is palpably fascinated by sound and how it is created, and it was revealing to see the way her eyes lit up when she was in the studio, surrounded by various mics and vintage consoles. At one point, when we were discussing some aspect of engineering, she stopped herself, remembering that this was an interview, and said, “That stuff’s kind of boring to a reader.” But I encouraged her to go on, because I could tell it was incredibly interesting to her , and I hoped that it would be illuminating for listeners to learn exactly what made Clark geek out. Even if those things are mic shootouts, modular synthesizers and the mechanics of signal flow.

We also discussed the long, improbable arc of her career, during which she’s gone from a coy indie darling to a mainstream-adjacent provocateur. “I’m curious, so I’ll say yes to things that are like, ‘I don’t know if I can do that,’ or, ‘I don’t know what this kind of music is like, let me find out,’” Clark told me. “So all those things have led me to crazy places that I’ve never expected.”

Today’s playlist is a map of some of those unexpected places: a collection of my 11 favorite St. Vincent songs, spread across her seven daring and eclectic albums, and featuring a few quotes from my interviews with Clark that did not make it into the profile. You’ll find tracks from her incomparable 2011 release “Strange Mercy,” her boldly slick 2017 LP “Masseduction” and more. I almost settled for 10 songs, but in classic Amplifier fashion, I added one more at the last minute. To make me choose between “Prince Johnny” and “Happy Birthday, Johnny” would have been cru-u-uellll .

Seeing double beats not seeing one of you,

Listen along while you read.

1. “now, now”.

This prickling, harmonic-kissed leadoff track from Clark’s 2007 debut LP, “Marry Me,” was the first St. Vincent song I heard, and I found its off-kilter tunefulness enchanting. Like much of the work she’d make in years to come, “Now, Now” revels in the precise moment when beauty begins to curdle into eeriness. ▶ Listen on Spotify , Apple Music or YouTube

The cover art for “Strange Mercy” — still my favorite St. Vincent album — depicts Clark’s open mouth plastered in some kind of a latex-like material, as if to trap a gasp or a scream in midair. A similar airlessness suffuses the single “Cruel,” which features a taut, blurted guitar riff and a gradually building sense of unease — albeit the kind you can dance to.

▶ Listen on Spotify , Apple Music or YouTube

3. “Prince Johnny”

Johnny is a recurring, possibly fictitious character in the St. Vincent catalog, often standing in as a brash, troubled foil to Clark’s narrator. (“Johnny’s just Johnny,” she said once, when asked about the character’s identity. “Doesn’t everyone know a Johnny?”) Here, on this affecting and atmospheric highlight from St. Vincent’s 2014 self-titled album, he’s an intimate but sometimes indifferent friend, to whom Clark sings in a particularly wrenching moment: “I wanna mean more than I mean to you.”

4. “Broken Man”

This wonderfully abrasive track from “All Born Screaming” features percussion from Dave Grohl and a crunching, industrial-tinged sound that compels Clark to holler herself hoarse. As she told me in one of our conversations, putting this track out as the album’s lead single was, for once, a no-brainer. “Other records, I’ve been like, ‘Oh that could be good, or this could be good for people to hear first,’” she said. But for “All Born Screaming,” “I felt very adamant that ‘Broken Man’ was first. Let’s throw some TNT.”

5. “Masseduction”

St. Vincent’s 2017 album “Masseduction,” featuring production by Jack Antonoff, was in some ways her sleekest and most pop-friendly, but as the title track shows, it still oozed with her own strange style. “I can’t turn off what turns me on,” Clark intones on this cartoonish exploration of desire and repulsion, while her expressive guitar growls and shrieks.

6. “Marrow”

St. Vincent’s second album, the 2009 release “Actor,” further warped the eerie beauty of “Marry Me,” as you can hear on this highlight, which blends a refrain reminiscent of a nursery rhyme with the asphyxiating mood of a horror film. A tiny sonic detail I love here: the physicality of the keyboard’s creak on that riff right after the first chorus.

7. “Live in the Dream”

The campy and chameleonic “Daddy’s Home,” from 2021, is probably St. Vincent’s most polarizing release, and while I was mixed on the album overall, I do love this bit of drifting, Pink Floyd-inspired psychedelia. Even if it’s pastiche, Clark pulls it off with aplomb.

8. “Surgeon”

This “Strange Mercy” track takes its chorus lyric from a line Marilyn Monroe once scrawled in her journal: “Best finest surgeon … come cut me open.” (Clark once said she wanted the song “to sound like it was kind of in a Benzedrine and white-wine coma — like a housewife’s cocktail.”) St. Vincent’s music often interrogates both femininity and depression, and those themes entwine here with haunting effectiveness, culminating in a gloriously unnerving guitar solo.

9. “Happy Birthday, Johnny”

This wry, devastating piano ballad cuts through the polish of “Masseduction” and aims straight for the heart. “Remember one Christmas I gave you Jim Carroll?/Intended it as a cautionary tale,” Clark sings, setting the scene like a short-story writer. “You said you saw yourself inside there/Dog-eared it like a how-to manual.”

10. “The Power’s Out”

When I asked about this creepily vivid apocalypse song, Clark told me, “I’ll be totally transparent: That’s my ‘Five Years’ for 2024,” making a reference to the David Bowie song. In some sense, Clark said, the song taps into a timeless fear: “Every generation, every religion, every culture has its Armageddon. Every generation thinks it will be the last. I think that’s our inability to reckon with death. Like, how could we leave and the world keeps on spinning? It must be that the world is going to end.”

11. “Severed Crossed Fingers”

Finally, this closing track from St. Vincent’s self-titled album borrows its striking, bleakly ironic title phrase from the author Lorrie Moore’s short-story collection “Birds of America.” “When you’re calling ain’t calling back to you,” Clark sings affectionately, “I’ll be side stage mouthing lines for you.” It’s a fitting encapsulation of Clark’s overall outlook, which she described to me as “optimism with an asterisk.”

The Amplifier Playlist

“St. Vincent’s 10 (or, Actually 11) Essential Songs” track list Track 1: “Now, Now” Track 2: “Cruel” Track 3: “Prince Johnny” Track 4: “Broken Man” Track 5: “Masseduction” Track 6: “Marrow” Track 7: “Live in the Dream” Track 8: “Surgeon” Track 9: “Happy Birthday, Johnny” Track 10: “The Power’s Out” Track 11: “Severed Crossed Fingers”

Bonus Tracks

From the great, now defunct website Rookie: the former youth soccer player St. Vincent demonstrating how to do a rainbow kick .

Also, this week’s Friday Playlis t has new music from Pearl Jam , Nilüfer Yanya , Thom Yorke and more — including a previously unreleased Johnny Cash track. Listen here .

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