The Night Mail

Night Mail

By W.H. Auden (Music by Benjamin Britten, Directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright).

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,

Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,

The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:

The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Thro' sparse counties she rampages,

Her driver's eye upon the gauges.

Panting up past lonely farms

Fed by the fireman's restless arms.

Striding forward along the rails

Thro' southern uplands with northern mails.

Winding up the valley to the watershed,

Thro' the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder

Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes

Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,

Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;

They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,

But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.

Down towards Glasgow she descends

Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,

Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces

Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.

All Scotland waits for her:

In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs

Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,

Letters of joy from the girl and the 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

Notes from overseas to Hebrides

Written on paper of every hue,

The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,

The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,

The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,

Clever, stupid, short and long,

The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep

Dreaming of terrifying monsters,

Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,

Asleep in granite Aberdeen,

They continue their dreams,

And shall wake soon and long for letters,

And none will hear the postman's knock

Without a quickening of the heart,

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?