CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF MELODIC TRAINS BY JOHN ASHBERY
Melodic Trains could be a poem of music and musings. It captures its metaphors and symbols from the experience of traveling by train. Ashbery compares this to the journey of life and tries to ascertain that common worries consume an excessive amount of of our energies and leave us little time to work out that others have similar problems which we will share and lessen. The corner stone of his poem is that the question that happens within the middle of the poem: “Why couldn’t/We are more considerate?”
The title of the poem sets a tone of harmony and concord. The trains are melodic not because the round of the wheels is so rhythmic, but because Ashbery sees all passengers as his brothers. He empathises with them and feels that on our individual journey of life we must share each others’ experiences and together establish a world more consonant amorously, happiness, and brotherhood. this is often possible providing everyone hears and shares the music of life. Thus all the complaints of his fellow passengers “strikes silver bells” in his heart.
The poem has the shape of a reverine started by a touch girl’s asking the poet what time it's the poet muses that the watch she is wearing may be a toy, which she is wearing to indicate that she is grown up. This starts a sequence of musings within which the poet thinks that the “tweed” coat and pipe he has placed on establish him only as an actor playing a heavy role. These clothes hardly show what quite person is hidden inside. This helps Ashbery bring the comparison of individuals as “unfathomable valleys” that has to be explored. They live before the background of giant mountains.
Ashbery equates the train to a “pencil guided by a ruler” to point out that life seems certain and planned and also the way seems “flat” and smooth against the “photomural of the Alps”. On this journey the distances between stations and people between passengers intrigue the poet. In his typical way of paradoxical statements Ashbery thinks that non-public distances is also something “unofficial and impersonal” though they'll sometime be correct sort of a stopped watch “right twice a day”.
Against this background of train journey as life, Ashbery paints the image of wait and worry at the stations. This brings within the theme of the poem in clearer perspective. The “clouds of tension, of sad regretful impatience” picture the issues of life and also the poet feels that the panic and disorder of the work is so little at the price of most unhappiness. This journey doesn't allow us to determine the people with us and therefore the only memory of the journey is of what we saw outside the train. The journey will end happily but people don't know that and keep pushing with dogged impatience.
This poem of music and musings is typical of Ashbery’s method of paradoxes and metaphors. His comparisons and metaphors are always supported his maxim that “Artists are not any fun once they need been discovered”. The poem therefore presents several surprising metaphors. The train journey is ready against the photomural of range and therefore the train may be a pencil guided by a ruler. The thick white clouds of steam appear as if “great white apples” and appear to be wearying and world-weary. Such figures should still be easy to know and result in an inventive appreciation of the poem but the ultimate description of citizen’s committee headed by the mayor hardly brings home to us if Ashbery is relating a cheerful end of life or of a straightforward journey. We are led to consider David Lehman writing in Beyond Amazement when he asks: “Does Ashbery’s poetry view meanings, or does it militate against the very possibility of articulating them?”
Ashbery draws his metaphors from many sources. Sometimes they're from Greek notions of perfectness of the circles as when he refers to the segment of chance within the circle of certainty. Similarly last stop means getting home, Ashbery relates this to life and also the end of life but how getting house is associated with the visible chorus evades us completely.
Equally ambiguous is that the figure of the zipper which is expounded to eh earlier image of dress but how it opens the scenery is sort of far fetched. The passengers’ voices have descending scalesthe town being nothing but a windmill and therefore the welcome at the last stop with the furniture of the air can hardly be taken as embellishment of the poem.
The poem is kind of musical because the title suggested and Ashbery’s frequent use of sonorous words adds to the music. He creates this effect of melody with assonance and consonance repeated in every line. The verse paragraphs follow one after the opposite just like the scenes and acts of a drama reaching its natural finale. On the entire the poem may be a model of optimistic and sunny side of 20th century literature.
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