Star Constellations

Hercules glinting Brightly                                                                                                                                                

His sword clasped in his Hand,                                                                                                                          

Pegasus’s’ wings out stretched                                                                                                        

Graceful, Beautiful and angelic

Lepus’ long ears Flapping                                                                                                                          

Bounding around Orion’s Feet,                                                                                                                            

Cancer’s pincers Clicking                                                                                                                             

Threateningly across the sky    

Pisces swimming Happily                                                                                                                                      

In the star-filled night                                                                                                                                  

Orion’s bow raised                                                                                                                                    Getting ready to

strike       

Emily K   

Night Mail

by W H Auden

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 and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland 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 coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or 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 in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and 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 of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

I really like the poem the Night Mail by W H Auden because of the feel it has to it if you read it aloud. You can hear the rhyming patterns as it is written in a rhyming couplet. . I also like the vivid pictures as the author describes the train journeying through the country. I like the rhythm of the poem as it makes me feel almost as if it is making the sound a train makes.