Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?
- At last—here we are at the last stanza. Finally, we're in for some answers to all those tricky questions our speaker's been peppering us with these past six lines… or not.
- Nope, our speaker has time for one last question before he moves off—presumably to ask more questions.
- In this case, our speaker's question is slightly more straightforward. At least, it's a yes-no question, so we're feeling good about our chances here.
- So, is a train in the rain the saddest thing ever? We wouldn't have thought so. Just like those guilty cars in stanza 3, trains can't really feel anything, right?
- Perhaps they can, according to our speaker. Why else would he ask this question?
- We'd guess that anything standing in the rain would be sad, though. Heck, just look at John Cusack. That is one sad dude.
- So, sure, if you want to suspend belief and go with the speaker's personification here again, we could see that a train in the rain could be feeling plenty of pain. But that's not the question, is it? The speaker seems to assume that this is of course a sad thing (duh), but is it the saddest thing ever?
- We don't have a good scale to measure this, really. The saddest thing to you might not be the saddest thing to us (it has to do with our senior prom, and no we don't want to talk about it). So what else might make this image extra-super-duper sad?
- Up to now, we've been focusing on the rain as the cause of the sadness here. That's natural, of course. Rain is a pretty handy symbol of sadness after all.
- But what else do we have here? We have a train, but more specifically it's a standing train. Think about it: a train's purpose is to move—freight, people, circus animals, whatever. The one thing that a train was not built to do was to stand around.
- If you take away a train's sole reason for existence, then, and toss in some rain for some extra sappy sauce, then we could totally see how this image might bum our speaker out.
- We still don't have a good answer for him, but maybe that's not the point here.
- Once again, our speaker's question has got us to dig a bit deeper than the surface of things. At that, Shmoopers, is what all good poetry aims to do.