The Tiny Arthurian Masterpiece You Probably Haven't Read

On John M. Ford's "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station"

For a long time I’ve been trying to track down a quote by Rosemary Sutcliff, which I think is from an introduction to one of her Arthurian novels, where she talks about the “Arthurian” feeling: that distinctive ineffable pang you get from great Arthurian art. You know the one.

Instead of defining it Sutcliff—probably wisely—offers an image: moonlight through trees. That’s it, that’s the Arthurian feeling. An unworldly, unreachable light shining through the dull scrim of reality, drawing the weary but dauntless adventurer endlessly on. This quote has been so elusive that I’m starting to think I may have made it up.

Nevertheless, sometimes while I was working on The Bright Sword I felt like I needed to reconnect with that feeling—owing to the creeping horror, as discussed—and so I would sit there and think about moonlight and trees and the interaction of same. I would also read and reread—more often than Tennyson, or White, or in fact Sutcliff—an odd and relatively little-known poem called “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station,” by John M. Ford.

The full text is here. I’ve never even seen a copy of it in print, but I think it’s one of the great Arthurian tellings of the 20^th century.

I know almost nothing about Ford, who was apparently quite famous during his lifetime, then passed into obscurity after his death, then was revived, and now may possibly be settling back into obscurity again. “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station” is a Christmas poem—the story goes that Ford wrote it as a Christmas card. It’s set at a re-imagined Camelot that has a dedicated rail hub.

This is objectively a terrible idea for a poem. It begins thus:

Camelot is served
By a sixteen-track stub terminal done in High Gothick Style,
The tracks covered by a single great barrel-vaulted glass roof framed upon iron,
At once looking back to the Romans and ahead to the Brunels.
Beneath its rotunda, just to the left of the ticket windows,
Is a mosaic floor depicting the Round Table
(Where all knights, regardless of their station of origin
Or class of accommodation, are equal),
And around it murals of knightly deeds in action
(Slaying dragons, righting wrongs, rescuing maidens tied to the tracks).
It is the only terminal, other than Gare d’Avalon in Paris,
To be hung with original tapestries,
And its lavatories rival those at the Great Gate of Kiev Central.

The Brunels, if you’re wondering, were a dynasty of British infrastructure engineers. It’s hard now to imagine writing a poem this densely allusive without the help of Wikipedia. (I think it first appeared in print in 1988.)

During a peak season such as this, some eighty trains a day pass through,
Five times the frequency at the old Londinium Terminus,
Ten times the number the Druid towermen knew.
(The Official Court Christmas Card this year displays
A crisp black-and-white Charles Clegg photograph from the King’s own collection.
Showing a woad-blued hogger at the throttle of “Old XCVII,”
The Fast Mail overnight to Eboracum. Those were the days.)

So they were.

The poem then introduces Sir Kay, “Tricked out in a bush coat from Swaine, Adeney, Brigg,/Leaning on his shooting stick,” leading a pack of young squires to meet the incoming trains, which will disgorge the great knights of the Table, one by one, who are coming home for Christmas. “Bors arrives behind steam, riding the cab of a heavy Mikado …” (Having written a book about a talking train, I know that a Mikado is a steam train with a 2-8-2 wheel configuration.)

Pellinore follows with the Questing Beast in a crate, except the crate proves to be mysteriously empty. “Gutman and Cairo have swindled him.” (Gutman and Cairo are characters from The Maltese Falcon.) Then Gawain and his brothers, then Palomides aboard the Direct-Orient Express.

Now here’s a silver train, stainless steel, Vista-Domed,
White-lighted grails on the engine (running no extra sections)
The Logres Limited, extra fare, extra fine,
(Stops on signal at Carbonek to receive passengers only).

This can only be Sir Galahad, introduced with a flashing smile and intimations of future sorrow. Mordred’s arrival ("He prefers to fly, but the weather was against it”) sends the poem turning for home. Finally Arthur himself rocks up with Lancelot, both disguised as hobos riding a rusty freight train. They’re left unnamed but You Know Who They Are:

The one who is King says “It all seemed so simple, once,”
And the best knight in the world says “It is. We make it hard.”

I thought a lot about using those lines for the epigraph of Bright Sword.

Ford divined a strange truth, that I never would have seen, which is that nostalgia for the Age of Rail must draw from something of the same well as Arthurian longing. They fit together weirdly neatly. Both vanished ages, never to return; or not even ages but hinge-moments between ages, beautiful but cuspy interstitial moments, doomed to pass swiftly, perfectly balanced between the past that led up to them and a future where they will have no place.

The metal expression of the breaking of boundaries,
The boilers that turn raw fire into power,
The driving rods that put the power to use,
The turning wheels that make all places equal,
The knowledge that the train may stop but the line goes on;
The train may stop
But the line goes on.

I’m getting the feeling again.