"Travel" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay is best known as one of the most respected American poets of the 20th century. She used her verse as a medium for her feminist activism. She wrote “Renascence” one of her first and most well-known poems and her book, The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Even the phrase “my candle burns at both ends” came from her poem “First Fig.” “Travel,” the poem that we will discuss in this analysis, is a short three-stanza poem that is divided into sets of four lines, also known as quatrains. These sets of lines follow the rhyme pattern of abab cbcb dbdb. The ‘b’ rhyme is repeated throughout this piece to create a sense of unity in the poem.



The poem begins with the speaker stating that there is a railroad track, “miles away” from where she lives. It is a feature that is always constant in her life. Although she can not see it every moment physically, it is always on her mind. The presence of the railroad tracks serves as a reminder of possibilities that are close but just out of reach. At the present moment, the speaker is in the middle of another noisy day of her life. She is experiencing a sense of claustrophobia around the “loud voices speaking” wherever she goes. There is not one train that goes by that the speaker does not hear, “whistle shrieking.” The fact that she can pick out this sound amongst the chaos of her life proves how important it is to her. Setting-wise, the speaker does not say that there is a railroad station near her, only a track. There is nowhere for the train to stop, and even if she could board it, it is always moving passed her.


As the poem continues, it becomes clear that the speaker developed an obsession with the train and where it might take her. Although it is now night and “there isn’t a train that goes by,” the speaker dreams about the train, picturing its “cinders red on the sky, engine steaming” as she sleeps. But why is the train so important? In the final quatrain, some light is shed on the significance of the train. The first topic that the speaker brings up is the “warm[th]” she feels towards her friends. She does not dislike her life since it is full of good people that she enjoys spending time with. The second line somewhat contradicts the first, as she says that there are “better friends” out there that she does not know and will “not be knowing” because she cannot board the train. The narrator keeps thinking of the future she could have had if she had been able to get on a passing train and see herself among people she prefers. By this point, the speaker’s tone has fully developed, she is worn out by the fact that her life is not going to change. By the end of the piece, it is clear to the reader that she has become uninterested in where the train is going, as long as it will take her somewhere new. Her greatest desire is to leave or ‘Travel’ as the title states.


The meaning behind this poem is not as direct as it seems. The train is used to describe how you can choose your journey. It also represents a desire to change and to show that there are different outcomes when taking adventures. This poem is often described as “wanderlust” meaning to have a strong desire to travel. In this case, the desire to travel refers to the change and opportunities you can take. In the last two lines, the poem states that “there isn’t a train I (the speaker) wouldn’t take, No matter where it’s going.” Meaning that the speaker will take any opportunity no matter the outcome. This quote can also be considered a call to action, urging people to change and “ride a train.”




• Noor E.