A thin new moon, a screeching train, and a shiver: the poem packs a whole night scene into a few short lines. The speaker pictures the moon as a pale fingernail scraping a blackboard, and that image makes you wince before the train even arrives. Then comes the sound itself, the shriek of wheels slightly off the track's true line, as if the same scraping has moved from the sky to the rails.
The train is huge and relentless: ninety-nine cars heaped with coal, rushing past in the dark. The speaker seems both uneasy and thrilled. The closing question, "don't it make you shiver," sounds like a song lyric, and the title suggests a link to music, though the poem never spells it out. The mood is eerie but also strangely pleasurable. The speaker invites us to share that chill, treating the night train as something frightening and beautiful at once, a loud, heavy force moving through an almost empty darkness.