A lullaby is supposed to soothe, and Jane Morrill's «A Lullaby for Travelers» does soothe, but with an odd twist: the cradle being rocked is a railway sleeping car, and the song comes from a world made of steel, speed and noise. The poem sets us inside a Pullman at night, behind "green curtains," and asks the passengers to sleep while the train carries them, still moving, into another state. Its central idea is a pleasing paradox: that restfulness and velocity can coexist, and that modern machinery, usually thought of as harsh, can be heard as something tender.
The opening already shows the poem's method. "Night and the green curtains of pullman cells" is a compact picture, and the word "cells" is worth lingering on. A sleeping berth is a small, enclosed, private space, almost monastic, and the poem treats each traveler as separately wrapped up in their own sleep. Then the single word "Sleep . . ." appears on its own line, like a hushed instruction. It returns at the very end, so the poem is bracketed by the same gentle command, much as a lullaby circles back to its refrain.
But the poem refuses to let the quiet be perfect. "The last loud talker boasts again," and the "rhythms bright as crickets" threaten to keep the brain awake. This is a clever bit of realism: anyone who has tried to sleep on a train knows the stubborn clatter and the human noise that will not quite die down. Yet the crickets simile quietly transforms the noise. By comparing the train's rhythms to insects chirping in a summer field, Morrill pulls the mechanical sound into the natural world, preparing us for what comes later. Even the sound that "cheer[s] the brain / To wakefulness" is described with warmth rather than irritation.
The rhyme is loose and unobtrusive. "Again" and "brain" chime together early on, but the poem does not commit to a regular pattern; most lines drift in free verse, with ellipses scattered through like soft pauses or half-closed eyes. That irregular movement suits the subject. A train does not move in perfect, predictable beats, and neither does a half-asleep mind. The long, flowing lines ("Dream to the gentle rumble of moonlit rails") contrast with the clipped single-word "Sleep . . .", so the reader feels the swell and release of the rocking carriage. The alliteration and soft consonants in "gentle rumble of moonlit rails" help make the sound itself lull.
The address "children of speed" is the poem's most interesting phrase. It names the passengers as infants to be soothed, but it also names their age: people born into a world where moving fast is normal. They are sleepers who are "hurtling to another state," a phrase that works on two levels, literally a different state of the country, but also, perhaps, a different state of mind, the border between waking and dreaming.
The final images push the poem into bolder territory. The trees are "marching, sky-pointed and black," like silhouetted soldiers, and then the train "panting" throws itself "Onto the knees of a girl hill, / Passing between her breasts softly, in dreamy speed." Here the landscape becomes a reclining woman and the train a kind of hurried, breathless presence moving across her body. The personification is striking and deliberately sensual, though the adverbs "softly" and "dreamy" keep the mood drowsy rather than aggressive. The image also turns the lullaby inside out: the earth itself becomes the mother, the comforting body that receives the machine.
What makes the poem notable is this blend of the mechanical and the maternal. Rather than setting the train against nature, Morrill lets them merge, so that engine, hill, crickets and dreamers all belong to one soothing night. In a few lines she shows that even a rushing, noisy age can be sung to sleep.