Outcomes:
Summaries, analysis and performances
Main Outcome:
Poem with similar structure
Length:
10 session, 2 weeks
Overview and Outcomes:
This is a two-week planning sequence using the poem ‘Night Mail’, which was written in 1936 to accompany the documentary film of the same year and the same title. The film depicted a London, Midland, and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train travelling from London to Scotland. It was produced by GPO Film Unit, directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, and narrated by John Grierson and Stuart Legg. Auden’s poem was read toward the end of the film, set to music by Benjamin Britten. Lines were chopped and changed to fit the film. The intention of the film was to show the public how the mail was distributed by train. The rhythm of the film matches the train’s movement. Auden apparently used a stopwatch as he set the lines to the film. The form of the poem is made up of eight rhymed, four-beat couplets.
Synopsis of Text:
Auden's poem for the sequence, entitled "Night Mail", was written at the film unit's main office in Soho Square. Watt described his work area as "A bare table at the end of a dark, smelly, noisy corridor", a contrast to the more peaceful surroundings that he was used to working in. He paced it to match the rhythm of the train's wheels "with a stopwatch in order to fit it exactly to the shot". Grierson biographer Forsyth Hardy wrote that Auden wrote the verse on a trial and error basis, and was cut to fit the visuals by editor Richard McNaughton in collaboration with Cavalcanti and Wright. Many lines from the original version were discarded and became "crumpled fragments in the wastepaper basket",including one that described the by the English-Scottish border as "uplands heaped like slaughtered horses" that Wright considered too strong for the landscape that was shot for it.
Links:
Film, trains, poetry, poems, verse
