A Sweet Elegy

ONE MORE post before calling it a night. Stephen Vincent Benet wrote a poem, "American Names," expressing his love for the names American pioneers and frontiersmen gave our cities and towns. The opening stanza goes:

I have fallen in love with American names, 

The sharp names that never get fat, 

The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, 

The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, 

Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

 

and many of us know the last line of his poem as the title of Dee Brown's best-seller:

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse. 

I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea. 

You may bury my body in Sussex grass, 

You may bury my tongue at Champmedy. 

I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. 

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. 

It came to mind as I was sitting in the lounge and a mellifluous voice came over the speakers in a mesmerizing rhythm:

"Now boarding at platform 2, train number 30, the Capital Limited, stopping at South Bend, Elkhart, Waterloo, Toledo, Sandusky, Elyria, Cleveland, Alliance, Pittsburgh, Connellsville, Cumberland, Martinsburg, Harpers Ferry, Rockville and Washington, DC."

I wanted to go up to her and ask her to read Benet's poem, but decided against it. However, it did make me think of Danny C's love of the allure and magic of railroading....