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, the girl
next door. Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb; the gradient's against her, but
she's on time. Past cotton-grass and moor land 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 coach’s
.Sheepdogs 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.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks. Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations To inspect new stock or to 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 on 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 the 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 a friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
By W H Auden