Nobody in "Night train" is named, and nobody is alone. Dave Bonta's poem opens with a plural pronoun, "we grow into our coach", and never lets go of it. The ordinary business of an overnight journey (drinking, sleeping, pacing the aisle, reading) becomes a kind of parable, in which a carriage of strangers turns into a small, self-contained people travelling through the dark.
The first couplet sets the strange tone. We usually board a coach or sit in one, but here we "grow into" it, the way a child grows into a coat or a plant into a pot. The verb makes the carriage almost organic and the passengers its slow inhabitants. By the time the night is deep, the compartment no longer feels like transport. It feels like a place to live.
Then come four similes, each pairing a plain verb with an old, weighty figure: "drink like brothers", "sleep like wells of light", "walk 'round like lost sheep", "read like patriarchs". Brothers, wells, sheep and patriarchs all belong to a shepherd's world, the vocabulary of the Old Testament, and the poem dresses a modern rail journey in that much older costume. Each comparison does a different job. "Brothers" gives the drinking warmth rather than rowdiness. "Wells of light" is the most puzzling and the most beautiful, because a well is a dark, deep place, yet here sleep is full of light. Perhaps it suggests the lit carriage gliding through blackness, or sleep as a source that refills us. The poem doesn't choose.
"Lost sheep" is gently comic and a little poignant. It pictures half-awake people drifting along the corridor, while "far from any houses" reminds us that outside there is no light and no shelter. The irony is that nobody on a train can really be lost, since the rails decide everything. The line captures the odd feeling of being adrift while being perfectly carried. "Patriarchs" is mock-grand in the same way: a passenger with a book at midnight is given the dignity of an elder. The phrase "shod with iron shoes" then hardens the picture. It may describe the train itself, whose iron wheels ride the rails, or the readers, who seem to wear the weight of the journey. The sentence leaves that ambiguous, and the heavy, fairy-tale sound of "iron shoes" suits the night.
The form is as pared down as the scene. There are five couplets, ten short lines, no rhyme, no capital letters, and no punctuation except the apostrophe in ’round. With no full stops, the poem runs on in one unhurried breath, much like a long journey in which one hour blurs into the next. The lines are short and close in length, which gives a steady, rocking pulse, and the repeated "like" works as a refrain, almost a rhythm of wheels. There is quiet sound-play too: "shod" and "shoes" share their opening sound, and "night" appears in both the first and last couplets, so the poem is framed by the dark it describes.
The ending changes the angle completely. After walking, reading and sleeping, the poem finally moves: "we fly through the night / cool as a glowworm." The speed is the first we feel, but the comparison deflates it. A glowworm is small and creeping, not a flier, and the picture that follows is of the whole train as one tiny, long, lit creature crawling across a vast dark landscape. The poem seems to step outside the window and look back. "Cool" also works twice, as calm, unbothered ease and as the literal quality of a glowworm's light, which glows without heat.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so few words. It makes an everyday experience feel mythic without becoming pompous, and it keeps a sense of humour about its own grandeur. It suggests that even in a modern machine, people fall back into very old states: companionship, wandering, rest and a small light carried through the night.