From the window of a speeding observation car, the speaker watches the Midwestern countryside rush past: rolling prairie, fresh-cut hay, a small gray village. Yet everything outside seems oddly frozen. Horses hitched at the post office don’t blink. Holstein cows in a barnyard look like white dabs on a black map, motionless. A signalman near Kansas City stands at his window as calm as a bronze statue. The title “Still Life” suggests a painting, and that is exactly the mood—quiet, detached, almost dreamlike. The train’s speed turns the world into a series of framed pictures, and the speaker seems to feel a peaceful awe at how the vast, busy landscape can appear so still and silent from a distance.
Still Life — Summary
Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car. Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour.
Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun.
A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the post-office never blink an eye.
A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black wall map, never blink an eye.
A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his place at a window with the serenity of a bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass whispering.