Stephen Spender's 'THE EXPRESS' glorifies the express train. The train here is a symbol of the modern industrial civilization. The poem begins with a description of the movement of the express train from a station. Its sound of horn suggesting its movement from the station and its slow royal movement is likened or is compared to the movement of a ‘queen’. The majesty that is hinted in the opening lines is continued in the next lines when the poet describes how the train passes "without bowing and with restrained unconcern". Just as crowds lineup humbly in the passage of the ‘queen’, the houses, the gas works and the graveyard lineup in the passage of the train.
Later, the majesty turns into mystery when the queen-like express leaves the town and enters the countryside. The poet now finds the train as self possessed and brilliant. Consequently, the train now begins to sing. The song of the train has its movement, low and loud and screaming and deafening, the train acquires a lightness that the wheels move as though in air.
The poet attributes human emotion to the Express when he says that it experiences new happiness as it passes. Several strange shapes, broad curves and 'trajectories from guns' are conjured up to describe its movement. The movement never seems to end but go beyond England, beyond Europe and beyond the world. None can check its progress. But when it is far away and in dark, there is a low streams-line brightness that it creates to illuminate the hills as well as the darkness of the world.
In the final lines the poet becomes more lyrical when he compares the train to a flaming comet in the sky and says that the train is so entranced that its music cannot be excelled by a bird's song. Thus the poem offers a sharp contrast to the traditional nature poems. Romantic poets often leave the city and find solace in the lap of nature. But Spender’s poem makes the express train a true romantic subject to say that the beauty of the world of machines excels the beauty of nature.
As has been suggested already the poem is a poetic description of an express train in its journey through day and night, it is also a prophecy of marxian ideology, so concrete as a train making its passage through the world. The words ‘manifesto', and 'statement' in the opening lines suggest that they are a reference to the communist manifesto and the political statement.
Below, a portrait of Stephen Spender and the full text of his poem "The Express" is provided.
Full Text of the Poem:
After the first powerful plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.
Without bowing and with restrained unconcern
She passes the houses which humbly crowd outside,
The gasworks and at last the heavy page
Of death, printed by gravestones in the cemetery.
Beyond the town there lies the open country
Where, gathering speed, she acquires mystery,
The luminous self-possession of ships on ocean.
It is now she begins to sing—at first quite low
Then loud, and at last with a jazzy madness—
The song of her whistle screaming at curves,
Of deafening tunnels, brakes, innumerable bolts.
And always light, aerial, underneath
Goes the elate metre of her wheels.
Steaming through metal landscape on her lines
She plunges new eras of wild happiness
Where speed throws up strange shapes, broad curves
And parallels clean like the steel of guns.
At last, further than Edinburgh or Rome,
Beyond the crest of the world, she reaches night
Where only a low streamline brightness
Of phosphorus on the tossing hills is white.
Ah, like a comet through flame, she moves entranced
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.
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