A train window works like a film strip, and Robert Kern builds "Travelling" from what slides past it: the stretch of land from Boston to New York, seen as "cruddy, with technological waste, wreckage." The speaker is a passenger, not a protester or a politician, and that is the poem's uncomfortable point. He looks at a ruined landscape from inside a machine that belongs to the same system that ruined it. The only thing he can say, twice, is a question: "An American, what can I do?"
That question frames the poem. It returns reversed, "What / can I do, an American?", as if the speaker keeps circling the same helplessness and cannot get out. Attaching "American" to it each time makes the responsibility national and personal at once. Between the two comes a third, more bewildered question: "Can politics / do this?" It sounds almost naive, but it shows a man hunting for someone to blame and finding the cause too large to hold.
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre. Its short, broken lines read like things glimpsed rather than composed. In "as into darkness / moves this train" the syntax is inverted so that the darkness arrives before the train, a small hint that this journey is not heading anywhere hopeful. The rhythm lengthens only once, in "In the lake, a quiet boat, a stillness prevailing," where the commas slow the line and the sound of "stillness prevailing" settles it. It is the poem's one moment of peace, and it is brief. Earlier, the ponds are "still mirrors under still sky." The doubled "still" makes the water feel embalmed, and mirrors suggest that we are looking at ourselves. What floats in them, "grey-brown fur protruding," is presumably a dead animal or sodden junk, since the poem never says. The speaker's wry guess, "must be / the rough beast that lives there," may echo the "rough beast" of Yeats's "The Second Coming," though that is an inference from the phrase. If so, the apocalyptic monster has shrunk to a scrap of fur in a pond.
Wordplay does much of the work. "A general throwing up of hands!" means widespread despair, but "general" also summons a military commander, and "throwing up" suggests both surrender and nausea. "The means of production / rise up to thwart the ends" plays on means and ends: the machinery built to serve human purposes now defeats them. Kern even makes the machinery behave like a rebellious crowd, "rising up."
The most imaginative moment is the reversal of the smokes: "A thousand disseminated smokes / re-gather in the sky / to return to their blackened stacks." The "re-" and "return" words run time backward, a wish that pollution could be taken back. The fantasy collapses at once into "How can we go anywhere / with all this luggage?" Here "I" becomes "we," and the luggage is both the bags on the train and the burden of what we have built and inherited.
Then the speaker addresses matter itself: "Material, it is not you! / Absorb our violence!" The exclamations pile up. He excuses the physical world, since the fault lies in us and not in the stuff, and then begs it to soak up what we do. It is half confession, half prayer, and it asks nature to do the work we will not.
No answer arrives. The last line is flat: "The great shopping centers / light up the night." Its calm tone is the sharpest irony in the poem. The "darkness" the train moved into at the start is now lit, but by commerce, not understanding. The glowing malls hint that the cycle producing the waste is about to start again.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses consolation. It offers no villain, no programme and no rescue, only a decent, guilty, helpless voice and a landscape that will not let him look away. The title even suggests the problem: we are always travelling, and always carrying the luggage.