Poems steam ahead
The thrill of sending and receiving letters is the subject of Poetry On The Air, which can be heard on RTHK's Radio 4 at 10.05 am today, repeated at 6.30 pm tomorrow.
When was the last time you received a letter from a friend or sent one yourself? In these days of fax and e-mail, 'snail mail' is used less and less. Yet it's still exciting to get a letter and know someone has taken the time to write to you.
This week, we will read and discuss part of a poem about the excitement of sending and receiving letters - Night Mail by W H Auden.
This is the second of two programmes about Auden's work.
In this poem, as in last week's Funeral Blues, we can see Auden's gift for expressing common human emotions in flexible, varied verse forms.
Night Mail was written in the 1930s as a commentary for a film on the work of the British post office.
The Night Mail is the express train which travelled overnight from London to Scotland taking letters for postal delivery. The poem is written in four sections.
As you read the first section, imagine the train travelling through the countryside at night, crossing the border between England and Scotland.
This would have been a steam train, and the steady rhythm of the verse, with its repeated rhymes, reflects the sounds of the moving train.
This is the Night Mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb: The gradient's against her but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder, Shovelling white steam over her shoulder, Snorting noisily she passes Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches, Stare from bushes at her blank- faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course; They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes, But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes . .
The third section of the poem focuses on the letters the train is bringing.
Auden's exuberant use of rhyme brings the variety of correspondence vividly to life.
There are rhymes within lines, and repeated double syllable rhymes - invitations, relations, applications, situations, declarations, nations - a headlong rush of ideas! The whole section runs for 19 lines without a full stop. Try reading it aloud without running out of breath.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks, Letters of joy from girl and boy, Receipted bills and invitations To inspect new stock or visit relations, And applications for situations, And timid lovers' declarations, And gossip, gossip from all the nations, News circumstantial, news financial, Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in, Letters with faces scrawled in the margin, Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts, Letters to Scotland from the south of France, Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands, Written on paper of every hue, The pink, the violet the white and the blue, The chatty, the catty, the boring the adoring, The cold and official, the heart's outpouring, Clever, stupid, short and long, The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
So who is going to receive these letters? This is the point of the poem - that anyone, all of us, love to get a letter.
In his concluding section, Auden looks at the recipients - still asleep and dreaming in various Scottish cities.
The poem moves into the calm reflective rhythms of unrhyming free verse.
They continue in their dreams, But shall wake soon and hope for letters And none shall hear the postman's knock Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten? This is an edited version of the programme.
