Connection to Nature
Perhaps the most significant theme in "Train Journey" is the relationship between the speaker and the landscape. This is articulated through the intimate addresses the speaker makes to the earth and the trees. The land itself is figured as the body of a woman with "delicate dry breasts," representing the way drought causes a place to be uninhabitable. Though the speaker is worried about the survival of the trees (she refers to them as small and slender), she becomes aware of the trees' resilience and ability to survive in the harsh landscape. It is through prompting the trees to claim their strength that the speaker acknowledges the life that her mother country is capable of producing and sustaining.
Beauty and Resilience
Because Wright relies heavily on personification in this poem, every detail takes on possible symbolic meaning. For example, the speaker is situated within the "confused hammering dark of the train," which could provide a hint about the speaker's own internal state. She feels worry and concern for the "country that built [her] heart." But by urging the trees to claim their strength, the speaker acknowledges their resilience, and she herself exemplifies resilience by soothing her own worries.
After communing with the trees, the speaker awakens to an image of the trees burning suddenly into flowers more lovely than the moon. This burning suggests the scorching sun that contributes to drought, but here it causes the trees to flower—representing beauty and the continuation of life. It is as though the speaker realizes these trees were designed to survive in this arid land, and are all the more beautiful for it.
Dreamscapes and the Environment
Throughout most of the poem, it seems that the speaker inhabits a twilight realm somewhere between sleeping and waking as she observes the passing landscape from a moving train. This imbues a dreamlike quality into the descriptions of the environment, which persists even after the speaker apparently wakes towards the end of the poem. After she wakes, the speaker sees the trees "burn / suddenly into flowers more lovely that the white moon." This is perhaps even more surreal than the earlier descriptions, which naturalizes a mysterious and beautiful experience.
