Night Mail (1936)

John Grierson: Commentary

Quotes 

• Commentary : [Reciting W.H. Auden poem]  This is the Night Mail crossing the Border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner, the girl next door. Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb: The gradient's against her, but she's on time...

• Commentary : [Reciting W.H. Auden poem]  Letters of thanks, letters from banks, Letters of joy from girl and boy, Receipted bills and invitations, To inspect new stock or to visit relations, And applications for situations, And timid lovers' declarations, And gossip, gossip from all the nations, News circumstantial, news financial, Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in, Letters with faces scrawled on the margin, Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts, Letters to Scotland from the South of France, Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands, Letters from overseas to the Hebrides, Written on paper of every hue, The pink, the violet, the white and the blue, The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring, The cold and official and the heart's outpouring, Clever, stupid, short and long, The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong...

• Commentary : [Reciting W.H. Auden poem]  Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder, Shovelling white steam over her shoulder, Snorting noisily as she passes, Silent miles of wind-bent grasses. Birds turn their heads as she approaches, Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches. Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course; They slumber on with paws across. In the farm she passes no one wakes, But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes...

• Commentary : [Reciting W.H. Auden poem]  Dawn freshens, Her climb is done. Down towards Glasgow she descends, Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes, Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces, Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen. All Scotland waits for her: In dark glens, beside pale-green sea-lochs, Men long for news...

• Commentary : [Reciting W.H. Auden poem]  Thousands are still asleep, Dreaming of terrifying monsters, Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's: Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, Asleep in granite Aberdeen, They continue their dreams - - But shall wake soon and hope for letters, And none will hear the postman's knock, Without a quickening of the heart, For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?