From a Railway Carriage

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According to the speaker, the train is not faster than them. Instead, the bridges, houses, hedges, and ditches, that move past his carriage showcase such swiftness. In the following line, he metaphorically describes the train as an army marching forward for a battle. The preparedness of the troops and their unhindered motion is comparable to that of the train. From the carriage, he can notice the horses and cattle grazing through the meadows. Each scene slides past the poet so fast that he cannot notice each one of them totally. That’s why he says that the things he sees are like a momentary glimpse or clips of a motion picture. Robert Louis Stevenson is an incredibly famous writer, and learners are sure to come across his writing as they move through school. Because he’s most famous for his novels, poems like ‘From a Railway Carriage’ give us an idea of another side of the writer - he really was multi-talented!

Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “From a Railway Carriage” begins with the description of the train’s speed. The reference to “fairies” and “witches” signifies the speaker is a child, familiar with the characters of fairy tales. He rejects the fact quite straightforwardly that this train he is riding is way faster than the winged fairies and magical witches. Stevenson uses a number of poetic devices to depict the movement of the train. The important figures of speech used in the poem are exemplified below: Simile You’ve read his poetry, but what about the man himself? Our Robert Louis Stevenson Information Sheet provides the story of the great man’s life along with some surprising and fascinating facts There are eight programmes in this series . Each of the first 6 programmes profiles a different contemporary children’s poet who introduces and then reads a selection of his or her work.The repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of consecutive lines is called anaphora. It occurs in:

Night Journey” by Theodore Roethke — Read how it feels while traveling by train at midnight. Roethke beautifully describes the nocturnal beauty of nature in this poem. This device is used in a number of instances; in the first stanza, there is a repetition of “and” throughout. Such repetition is also called polysyndeton. The recurrence of the conjunction signifies a sense of continuity. In the second stanza, Stevenson uses the word “Here” at the beginning of alternative lines until line 5. Rhetorical Exclamation The poem “From a Railway Carriage” begins with a simile: “Faster than fairies” and “faster than witches.” Stevenson describes how the fairies and witches are not as fast as the train. This device is also used in lines 3 and 6: Stevenson’s “From a Railway Carriage” is written from the perspective of a child who is traveling by train and capturing the external world from his carriage. He is quite amazed to experience the speed with which the train marches forward like troops in a battle. It moves faster than the fairies and witches collectively. From his carriage, he sees how the sights of the hill and plain fly past. The painted stations whistle by in a wink. The repetition of a similar sound at the beginning of neighboring words is called alliteration. It is used to create internal rhyming. This device is used in the following instances:The rhyme scheme of “From a Railway Carriage” is AABB. It means each two lines end with similar rhyming words; for instance, the first two lines contain end rhymes: “witches” and “ditches”. This scheme is followed throughout the text. The rhyming pairs of words include: