The rhythm and the rail

Robert Louis Stevenson’s From a Railway Carriage is a masterpiece of rhythmic verse that captures the poet’s idyllic experience of a railway journey. It is undoubtedly one of my favourite poems, and despite my frail memory, I can still recite it in one breath. Even now, whenever I’m on a train journey, my mind skips with joy to recite the iconic lines: Faster than fairies, faster than witches/Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches.

The rhythm of the poem echoes the rhythm of the train whizzing past, with the clattering of wheels and the hissing of the engine. Few poems can claim to be so powerful in both rhythm and imagery.

Recently, I embarked on a train journey from Bishnupur to Asansol on a local train that departs from Bishnupur station at 5:10 am. Though I am generally reluctant to carry a smartphone because of its uncomfortable size and weight, I decided to carry one this time and capture the entire journey on my mobile phone’s video camera to savour my favourite poem with picturesque landscapes in reality. 

As the train whistled and started moving, I held my phone to capture the outside landscape receding by as thick as driving rain. The fleeting sights screened through the window bars of the train were constantly changing.

The next day after returning home, I opened my smartphone to watch the video. I was overwhelmed with ecstatic joy. I could equate the fleeting images and the panting rhythm of the running train captured in my mobile phone with those of the poem quite accurately.

A little after the golden sun rising with its first splendour, the video became clear enough. The train was charging through the meadows with cattle grazing in the pastures and peasants working in the fields. A few bullock carts with loads of sheaves of paddy straw were lurching on the village roads. The camera caught glimpses of the beautiful monolithic Joychandi Pahar (hill) and other hillocks beside it.

The first-moving array of images in the camera included wild date palms bearing bunches of yellow and maroon seed-dominated fruits, women trudging towards the market with the huge baskets loaded with vegetables balancing on their heads, the fields sparsely covered with hedges and bushes, huts in the hamlets, cowboys tending herds of cattle, the chimneys of the factories puffing off smokes and so on. 

The train whistled by the painted stations. The platforms were sparsely crowded with passengers. The train crossed over the river Damodar, once called the “Sorrow of Bengal”. The emaciated river looked like a silver belt gliding by at its own sweet will under the bridge. It is for the first time the sound of the train changed. 

However, the entire train journey entrapped in my mobile set is undoubtedly a treasure trove to me. As I have a little opportunity to travel by train, the video of the journey will enable me to savour the taste of it. Above all, from now on I can recite the favourite lines of my favourite poem sitting in my drawing room with the video of the train journey on my smartphone only to extol my childhood love of a poem.