The train car window, then, offered a new way of seeing the world, and a new way of seeing the world produces an entirely new world, a strange world, even a discomforting world, as Cowen’s speakers, far from home, pressed against strangers, and riding through foreign terrain, similarly realize: The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red or white there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak the grainfields are great shocks of yellow hair fields of alfalfa, long green tresses the towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy mingling dance on the horizon from time to time, a shadow, a shape, a spectre appears and disappears with lightning speed behind the window: it’s a railway guard. Schivelbusch quotes Victor Hugo’s description of the view from a train window in a letter dated 22 August 1837: They could no longer look ahead rather, “all they saw was an evanescent landscape” (55). So too rail travel changed travelers’ sensory perceptions dramatically-not only did the smells and sounds that might accompany a long coach ride disappear, but travelers’ visual perceptions were changed entirely.
Indeed, early passengers who used the new train technology found themselves strangely objectified by the experience, turned from a person into a parcel, as a popular nineteenth century saying phrased it. In his fascinating study The Railway Journey (University of California Press, 1977), historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch explores the new experience of train travel in the nineteenth century and how it affected passengers who were used to much slower forms of overland travel-like the walk, the horse ride, and the stagecoach.
While the collective “we” had hoped, like many tourists, to “dash between // the tomes of history, just to see / the sights,” the speakers “arrived after the Iraq invasion” but “before the European heat wave.” It is here, in between the “before” and “after,” and during “the usual transit strike,” that a gap forms, opening normal, scheduled time to actual, lived time and opening expectation to experience.īy the poem’s sixth line, the speakers find themselves on the train, “doubled up / in the cars, too many of us.” Even though the tourist experience of traveling among foreign countries by train is relatively common, Cowan’s poem reveals that there is nonetheless something unsteady, something unfamiliar, about that experience, for the “too many of us” find themselves “awake in the sleeper.” So too, here, the poem switches abruptly into present tense, the train’s unsteadying effect carried over into written effect as the poem itself-long and thin-journeys down the page. Indeed, from the beginning, before the train is ever boarded, this travel poem opens a space in time in which the unexpected can occur. At the heart of Donna Lewis Cowan’s poem “Paris to Rome” is the jarring and yet ultimately productive mystery of a train ride.