Train-Mates

Outside hove Shasta, snowy height on height,

A glory; but a negligible sight,

For you had often seen a mountain-peak

But not my paper. So we came to speak...


A smoke, a smile,—a good way to commence
The comfortable exchange of difference!

You a young engineer, five feet eleven,

Forty-five chest, with football in your heaven,

Liking a road-bed newly built and clean,

Your fingers hot to cut away the green
Of brush and flowers that bring beside a track

The kind of beauty steel lines ought to lack,—

And I a poet, wistful of my betters,

Reading George Meredith's high-hearted letters,

Joining betweenwhile in the mingled speech
Of a drummer, circus-man, and parson, each

Absorbing to himself—as I to me

And you to you—a glad identity!


After a time, when others went away,

A curious kinship made us choose to stay,
Which I could tell you now; but at the time

You thought of baseball teams and I of rhyme,

Until we found that we were college men

And smoked more easily and smiled again;

And I from Cambridge cried, the poet still:
"I know your fine Greek theatre on the hill

At Berkeley!" With your happy Grecian head

Upraised, "I never saw the place," you said—

"Once I was free of class, I always went

Out to the field."

Young engineer, you meant

As fair a tribute to the better part

As ever I did. Beauty of the heart

Is evident in temples. But it breathes

Alive where athletes quicken curly wreaths,
Which are the lovelier because they die.

You are a poet quite as much as I,

Though differences appear in what we do,

And I an athlete quite as much as you.

Because you half-surmise my quarter-mile
And I your quatrain, we could greet and smile.

Who knows but we shall look again and find

The circus-man and drummer, not behind

But leading in our visible estate—

As discus-thrower and as laureate?
Train-Mates

by Witter Bynner, 1913
