At Memphis Station

^{Translated from the Danish by S. Foster Damon}

Half-awake and half-dozing,
in an inward seawind of danaid dreams,
I stand and gnash my teeth
at Memphis Station, Tennessee.
It is raining.

The night is so barren, extinguished,
and the rain scourges the earth
with a dark, idiotic energy.
Everything is soggy and impassable.

Why are we held up, hour upon hour?
Why should my destiny be stopped here? 
Have I fled rain and soul-corrosion
in Denmark, India, and Japan,
to be rain-bound, to rot, in Memphis,
Tennessee, U. S. A.?

And now it dawns. Drearily light oozes
down over this damp jail.
The day uncovers mercilessly
the frigid rails and all the black mud,
the waiting-room with the slot-machine,
orange peels, cigar-and match-stumps.
The day grins through with spewing roof-gutters,
and the infinite palings of rain,
rain, say I, from heaven and to earth.

How deaf the world is, and immovable!
How banal the Creator!
And why do I go on paying dues
at this plebeian sanatorium of an existence!

Stillness. See how the engine,
the enormous machine, stands calmly and seethes;
shrouding itself in smoke, it is patient.
Light your pipe on a fasting heart,
damn God, and swallow your sorrow!

Yet go and stay in Memphis! 
Your life, after all, is nothing but
a sickening drift of rain, and your fate
was always to be belated
in some miserable waiting-room or other—
Stay in Memphis, Tennessee!

For within one of these bill-shouting houses,
happiness awaits you, happiness,
if you can only gulp down your impatience—
and here there is sleeping a buxom young girl
with one ear lost in her hair;
she will come to encounter you
some fine day on the street,
like a wave of fragrance,
looking as though she knew you.

Is it not spring?
Does the rain not fall richly?
Is there not the sound of an amorous murmur,
a long, subdued conversation of love
mouth to mouth
between the rain and the earth?
The day began so sadly,
but now, see the rainfall brighten!
Do you not allow the day its right of battle?
So now it is light. And there is a smell of mould
from between the rusted underpinning of the platform
mingled with the rain-dust’s rank breath—
a suggestion of spring—
is that no consolation?

And now see, see how the Mississippi
in its bed of flooded forest
wakes against the day!
See how the titanic river revels in its twisting!
How royally it dashes through its bends, and swings the rafts
of trees and torn planks in its whirls!
See how it twirls a huge stern-wheeler
in its deluge-arms
like a dancer, master of the floor!
See the sunken headland—oh, what immense, primeval peace
over the landscape of drowned forests!
Do you not see how the current’s dawn-waters
clothe themselves mile-broad in the day’s cheap light,
and wander healthily under the teeming clouds!

Pull yourself together, irreconcilable man!
Will you never forget that you have been promised Eternity?
Will you grudge the earth its due, your poor gratitude?
What would you do, with your heart of love?

Pull yourself together, and stay in Memphis;
announce yourself in the market as a citizen;
go in and insure yourself among the others; 
pay your premium of vulgarity,
so that they can know they are safe, as regards you,
and you will not be fired out of the club.
Court the damosel with roses and gold rings,
and begin your saw-mill, like other people.
Yank on your rubbers regularly . . .
Look about you, smoke your sapient pipe
in sphinx-deserted Memphis . . .

Ah! there comes that miserable freight-train
which has kept us waiting six hours.
It rolls in slowly—with smashed sides;
it pipes weakly; the cars limp on three wheels;
and the broken roof drips with clay and slime.
But in the tender, among the coals,
lie four still forms
covered with bloody coats.

Then our huge express-locomotive snorts;
advances a little; stops, sighing deeply;
and stands crouched for the leap. The track is clear.

And we travel onward
through the flooded forest
under the rain’s gaping sluices.
 

Read the original Danish version of the poem here

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 25, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“At Memphis Station” first appeared as “Paa Memphis Station” in the March 1904 issue of the Danish literary magazine Tilskueren, and again in Johannes V. Jensen’s Digte (Gyldendal, 1906). Later, it was translated into English by S. Foster Damon and published in A Book of Danish Verse (The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1922). As Sven Hakon Rossel recounts in Johannes V. Jensen (G. K. Hall & Company, 1984), the poem was inspired by an overnight stay in Brinkley, Arkansas, which was made necessary by a delayed train meant to take Jensen from Little Rock to Memphis. As Rossel writes, “His mental state during this enforced wait was shortly after analyzed—with a deliberate change of city name—in the major poem ‘Paa Memphis Station’ [. . .].” Daniel Kilham Dodge, in his review of A Book of Danish Verse published in Scandinavian Studies and Notes vol. 7, no. 9 (November, 1923), compares Damon’s English version to “an original poem by Carl Sandburg or Vachel Lindsay,” and further remarks that, among the many translations included in A Book of Danish Verse, Jensen “furnishes the only example of free verse, which does not seem to be so popular in Denmark as in Germany.” Indeed, Jensen’s later work would increasingly exhibit the “regular” or “classical” meters of poets such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Adam Oehlenschläger over the “eruptive free verse of his first collection,” according to Rossel. Concerning the themes of “At Memphis Station,” Rossel writes that though it describes “the dread of the possibility that destiny has come to a standstill,” and that it takes as its setting “the borderland between dream and reality as the point of departure for the succeeding spiritual conflict between resignation and engagement,” the poem concludes with the speaker’s epiphany that the “realization of death frees his hunger for life; [. . .] he must free himself through his longing.”