Modern American Poetry

(^182) Richard Poirier
She fears not him, they fear not life.
They know where another light has been,
And more than one, to theirs akin,
But earlier out for bed tonight,
So lost on me in my surface flight.
“Surface flight” necessarily describes more than the train’s movement.
It reminds us of the unabashed superficiality of the man’s vision. The
concluding lines are justly critical of the poetic vision or realization that
precedes them: the engine smoke abets the sentimentality of his “clouded
mind.” The claim that he sees “far into” anything suggests distance rather
than powers of penetration:
This I saw when waking late,
Going by at a railroad rate,
Looking through wreaths of engine smoke
Far into the lives of other folk.
The poem is a critical inquiry into itself and its own procedures. It
dramatizes the action of a mind attempting to make metaphorical
enhancements, but its language suggests that the action is too casually a
violation of privacies. The kind of mythologizing in which this man engages
is often a “flight” over the surface of reality rather than into it. Lawrence’s
delighted remark about Whitman comes to mind: “ALLNESS! shrieks Walt
at a crossroads, going whizz over an unwary Red Cap Indian.”
As if spoken from the same train window, “The Figure in the
Doorway” reads like an effort to correct such poetic “flights” from wobbling
off course. Frost’s train-window poems are different from Rossetti’s—as in
the series “A Trip to Paris and Belgium”—in that they raise not merely
phenomenological problems but questions of misreading, of necessary
failures of perception:
The grade surmounted, we were riding high
Through level mountains nothing to the eye
But scrub oak, scrub oak and the lack of earth
That kept the oaks from getting any girth.
But as through the monotony we ran,
We came to where there was a living man.
His great gaunt figure filled his cabin door,
And had he fallen inward on the floor,