The Train Symbol in And Yet: Suppressed Emotion and Transition

What is the Train Symbol in And Yet?

In Kate Baer's 2022 poetry collection And Yet, the train appears as a recurring concrete image that carries emotional and psychological weight. Literally, the train is a mechanical vehicle—sometimes a passenger train, sometimes a subway or dream-train—but it always functions as a vessel for suppressed feelings, transition, or suspended states. It appears in several poems, each time with a slightly different shade of meaning, yet consistently tied to the speaker's inner life and the pressures of motherhood, ambition, and loss.

The train first appears in My Ambition Goes Off to War, where it literally departs, carrying the speaker's personified ambition away: "The train departs, its smoke fading into clouds." Later, in Late Summer in a Global Pandemic, a train "pulls in, parks below my throat" as the speaker endures her children's demands. In When Someone Asks If I Ever Think of You, the speaker takes a thirty-second train ride from bed into half-sleep. And in Most Likely Scenario, a surreal train descends to the bottom of the ocean. Throughout, the train symbolizes the weight of what cannot be said and the journey between states of being—waking and dreaming, present and past, hope and resignation.

Where the Train Recurs

The train appears in at least four distinct poems, each with a unique context:

In each case, the train is not merely a vehicle—it is the container for an emotional state that the speaker cannot fully express or escape.

How the Meaning Changes

The train's meaning evolves across the collection, reflecting different psychological pressures.

Suppressed Emotion

In Late Summer in a Global Pandemic, the train "parks below my throat." This is a visceral image of an emotion that cannot be released—a lump, a held-back scream, a desire to put the world on hold. The speaker's children have written a note asking "Can you jest be nice?" after she refuses bad strawberries and hears her son ask for a different mother. The train represents the unspeakable exhaustion of pandemic parenting. It is stagnant, parked, opposite of movement.

Transition and Threshold

In When Someone Asks If I Ever Think of You, the train is a nightly ritual: "I take the train at night, only a thirty-second ride / from bed to brain to half-sleep." Here the train is a passive, mechanical passage between waking consciousness and dreaming. The platform welcomes the lost loved one; the speaker and the loved one "hardly talk these days, too scared to disrupt the gods." The train facilitates a liminal space where memory and grief can meet. It is neither fully real nor fully imagined—a threshold.

Severed Connection

In My Ambition Goes Off to War, the train departs and the speaker never receives postcards. The separation is complete. At first the speaker requests updates, but the ambition ignores her. The train symbolizes ambition's final departure into a world the speaker cannot access—war, duty, indifferent reality. The glitter heels packed in the suitcase clash with the commander's stoic inspection, suggesting that personal desire is lost in larger systems.

Creative Disappointment

In Most Likely Scenario, the train takes the speaker to the bottom of the ocean, where the devil hands her slippers and dismisses her books for lack of time. The speaker says, "I thought this would be different." Here the train is a vehicle of anti-climax, carrying expectation into surreal failure. The fish laugh and wave goodbye. The train's descent mirrors artistic frustration: the journey promised transformation but delivers absurdity.

Character and Theme Connections

The train is almost always connected to the speaker-poet persona. In poems where the speaker is explicitly a mother, the train carries maternal burden. In Late Summer, it is the pressure of constant caregiving. In When Someone Asks, it is grief for a person now unreachable. The train also connects to the husband and children indirectly—their presence or absence shapes the speaker's ability to speak.

Themes that intersect with the train:

• Motherhood: In Late Summer, the train parks at the throat of a mother who has no time for herself. Motherhood is the source of suppressed emotion.
• Authenticity vs Performance: In My Ambition, the train carries a personified drive away from domestic life. The speaker's authentic ambition cannot coexist with her performed role.
• Resilience and Perseverance: Though the train often carries suppressed feeling, the speaker continues to ride it. She does not derail. Even in Most Likely Scenario, she boards again.
• Gender Roles and Expectations: The train in Late Summer is a response to being the "nice" mother who cannot express frustration. The note "Can you jest be nice?" highlights the pressure to perform agreeable femininity.
• Digital Culture and Media Saturation: While not directly digital, the train in When Someone Asks is a nightly ritual akin to scrolling—a thirty-second escape into a different space.

The train rarely features the daughter or friend directly, but their presence in Late Summer triggers the train's arrival. The mother (the speaker's mother or archetype) does not appear in train poems, but the archetype of the self-sacrificing mother hangs over each parked engine.

Study Questions and Answers

1. Why does the train park "below my throat" in Late Summer in a Global Pandemic?

The train represents an emotion the speaker cannot vocalize—likely anger, exhaustion, or a request for respite. By parking below the throat, it blocks speech, mirroring how the speaker suppresses a desire to stop the world's demands. The children's request to "jest be nice" signals that direct expression would violate the maternal role. The train is the physical sensation of holding words in.

2. How is the train in When Someone Asks If I Ever Think of You different from the train in Most Likely Scenario?

In When Someone Asks, the train is a gentle, nightly passage to half-sleep and a dream encounter with a lost loved one. It is sacred—speakers hardly talk to avoid disturbing the gods. In Most Likely Scenario, the train is absurd and disappointing: it goes to the bottom of the ocean, the devil dismisses the speaker's books, and the fish laugh. The first train preserves hope; the second satirizes it. The contrast shows how the same symbol can shift from consolation to critique.

3. What does the train's departure in My Ambition Goes Off to War suggest about the speaker's relationship with her own drive?

The train's departure symbolizes ambition becoming an autonomous, foreign force. The speaker packs the suitcase with ordinary items and glitter heels—practicality mixed with fantasy—yet the commander does not react. The ambition does not send postcards. This suggests that the speaker's drive has been co-opted by external structures (war, duty) and no longer communicates with her inner self. The severed connection reflects how domestic life can alienate a person from their own desires.

4. How does the theme of transition appear in train poems beyond simply moving from place to place?

Beyond literal motion, trains mark transitions between emotional states: from wakefulness to half-sleep in When Someone Asks; from hope to disappointment in Most Likely Scenario; from strained silence to potential outburst in Late Summer. The train is always in a between-space—departing, parking, riding a short distance. It never arrives at a final destination in these poems. This reinforces the collection's larger theme of suspended hope, first introduced by the Anne Carson epigraph: "To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope." The train is the vehicle of that suspension.

Conclusion

The train in Kate Baer's And Yet is a versatile symbol that anchors the collection's exploration of suppressed emotion, change, and the thresholds between inner and outer worlds. Whether parked below the throat, gliding into half-sleep, or sinking to the ocean floor, the train carries the speaker's unspoken weight. For readers studying the poem's imagery, following the train across its appearances reveals how a single concrete symbol can hold multiple meanings—loss, exhaustion, grief, and the stubborn human desire to keep moving forward.

For further analysis, explore related themes such as digital culture and media saturation or the speaker-poet persona.