Rain, Steam and Speed

Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway

Joseph Mallord Turner

1844

 

Run little hare, run for your life

run through the rain as fast as you can

run in a line like the monster behind you –

to be saved by your speed, little hare

try to outrun the thundering engine

jink in a moment so that the giant

rumbling by, as blind as Orion

will travel away, way past a hare

one sodden ploughman led by his horses

two men in their boat trying to fish

along with some others on the far bank –

none of them noticed. No, no one saw you

not even the man who wanted to see

thrusting his head out of the window

blinded by rain driven into his eyes

straining to breathe through the steam and the speed

to find himself falling back breathless like you –

now at rest.  No need to run any more

as the rain goes on raining, the river flows by

and all those various people remaining

continue to do whatever they do

in no kind of hurry –

unlike a train chasing a hare

a little brown hare that ran through the rain.

 

 

I find the image of Turner leaning out from his carriage into the rushing rain, steam and smoke in an attempt to capture the full experience impressively memorable.

Onwards – indeed obliquely towards us – speeds the latest man-made powerful engine, on the newly constructed Great Western Railway... a wonderful demonstration of the most recent technology in action.

Someone watching it in 1844 might well have been amazed, astounded and captivated.

Not unlike, of course, how 182 years later, many of us were as we watched the latest extraordinary technological achievement of speed, power and the shrinking of distances *.

Much has been written about this justly famous painting – its celebration of travel and new technological power, with the railway representing the industrialisation that was transforming the British landscape and consequently its people etc. etc.

But impressed as Turner undoubtedly was by industrial achievement, this predominantly landscape painter is presenting another here, even if this one has been radically altered by that industrialisation. Only about a quarter of the canvas depicts the train; most of it is a painting of mist, rain and quiet goings-on, uninfluenced by the train rushing across the bridge.

I'm not sure how much the painter was making the point that life does indeed just carry on, whatever extraordinary events may be taking place above, but there's certainly a marked contrast between the simple activities on the ground and water, and all that the flying locomotive represents.

And the hare?

It's very hard to see (as indeed they can be), especially in reproductions; perhaps the picture above doesn't capture it – but maybe that's part of the story. Still, it is there.  Whether it outran the engine, or saved itself by darting sideways or was crushed, is yours to decide – I've left it uncertain in my poem, along with any allegory you might decide to adopt.

  

*I stumbled on an interesting parallel between these two events via the name Orion. 

Orion's association with the recent Artemis flight is well known.  The locomotive in the painting is thought to be a Fire Fly, one of which built in 1842 was called Orion.  Whether this was indeed Turner's engine (which it might well have been) matters less than the fact that Orion  in the Greek myth (a giant in his own right) was blinded.  I wanted to refer in my poem to this engine roaring inexorably onwards on its rails, that cannot see. And the artist himself, who found that the  rain, steam and speed blinded him, thankfully only temporarily, too.