Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Tony Hoagland’s "Two Trains" is a meditation on shifting interpretations, personal loss, and the way meaning evolves with time and experience. Structured as a progression of understanding—moving from a literal reading to metaphorical layers involving sex, religion, and finally grief—the poem explores how songs, like life itself, refuse to be confined to a single meaning. Through conversational tone, vivid imagery, and gradual emotional deepening, Hoagland traces the movement of time and the inexorable separations that define human existence.

The poem begins with the speaker recalling "that song called ?Two Trains Running,? a Mississippi blues they play on late night radio." This introduction immediately situates the poem in the realm of music, memory, and personal reflection. The specificity of “FM in the AM” establishes an intimate, nocturnal setting—radio listened to in solitude, perhaps during moments of reflection or sleeplessness. The speaker’s initial assumption is straightforward: “I always thought it was about trains.” This flat, almost naïve statement introduces the poem’s thematic concern—how understanding shifts over time, deepening with experience.

The first revelation comes when someone informs the speaker that the song is about sex. The metaphor of “what a man and woman under the covers of their bed, moving back and forth like slow pistons in a shiny black locomotive” transforms the seemingly innocent train imagery into an erotic one. The mechanical language—“rods and valves trying to stay coordinated”—captures both the mechanical rhythm of sex and the effort required for synchronization. The image of “one of the trains” disappearing “into the mountain tunnel” is unmistakably suggestive, yet the passage retains a sensual elegance rather than descending into crudeness. The final line of this section—“into a sky so sharp and blue you want to die”—introduces the first note of emotional intensity, suggesting that even this interpretation, rooted in physical pleasure, has a transcendent, almost painful beauty.

But just as the speaker settles into this understanding, another layer is introduced. “But then Mack told me that all train songs are really about Jesus.” The poem shifts from the physical to the spiritual, moving beyond sex to the metaphor of divine accompaniment. The “second train” becomes a representation of Christ, shadowing the first, ensuring that the traveler is never truly alone. The religious imagery is richly developed—Jesus as brakeman, engineer, coolant, coal—suggesting that faith provides both guidance and propulsion, support in both stillness and motion. The “rough chuff chuff of His fingers on the washboard and the harmonica woo woo” transforms the sounds of a train into a gospel song, evoking the “long soul cry” of blues music, now repurposed as a spiritual lament. The phrase “bloody tunnel of the world” reinforces this religious framing, linking suffering to redemption.

But the poem does not settle on this interpretation either. Instead, it moves toward a more personal and existential realization. The speaker recounts a series of personal losses—quitting a job in Santa Fe, a heartbreak from “Sharon [who] drove her spike heel through the center of my heart,” the passage of “twelve years,” a friend “Dean [who] moved away.” These details shift the poem from abstract metaphor to lived experience. With time and distance, the speaker’s understanding of the song changes again: “and now I think the song might be about goodbyes.”

This realization carries a quiet devastation. The metaphor of trains no longer represents sex or salvation but separation. “We are not even in the same time zone, or moving at the same speed, or perhaps even headed towards the same destination— / forgodsakes, we are not even trains!” The italicized "forgodsakes" conveys frustration, an outburst against the very metaphor that once seemed so profound. Here, the poem strips away symbolism, confronting the raw truth: people simply drift apart, often without reason or resolution. The grief of loving people “like your own blood” only to see them disappear underscores the inevitability of loss.

The poem’s final stanza deepens this grief with a powerful image of absence. The speaker describes the moment just after a train has passed: “the deaf, defoliated silence / just after a train has thundered past the platform.” This moment—the aftermath of something powerful, loud, and unstoppable—becomes an analogy for loss itself. The use of “deaf” and “defoliated” suggests not only silence but a stripping away, a barrenness left in the wake of something that was once full of life. The world, however, continues indifferent: “just before the mindless birds begin to chirp again.” Nature resumes, unaware of what has been lost.

The final image—“the wildflowers that grow along the tracks wobble wildly on their little stems, / then gradually grow still and stand / motherless and vertical in the middle of everything”—is quietly devastating. The wildflowers, shaken by the passing train, represent those left behind, those affected by the loss but ultimately forced to endure. The word “motherless” suggests abandonment, emphasizing the loneliness that follows departure. The final phrase—“in the middle of everything”—captures the way grief exists alongside the ongoing world, unnoticed and yet profoundly present.

"Two Trains" is a meditation on the way meaning shifts with time, how the same song (or experience) can reveal different truths depending on where we are in life. Hoagland moves seamlessly from sex to spirituality to personal loss, demonstrating how each interpretation builds upon the last without fully negating it. In the end, the poem settles into an acceptance of impermanence—the understanding that love, faith, and connection are all temporary, and that we are left to stand, like those wildflowers by the tracks, in the silence of what has passed.

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