BA #5

Jack Kerouac: "The Railroad Earth"

“It was the fantastic drowse and drum hum of lum mum afternoon nathin’ to do, ole Frisco with end of land sadness—the people—the alley full of trucks and cars of businesses nearabouts and nobody knew or far from cared who I was all my life three thousand five hundred miles from birth O opened up and at last belonged to me in Great America.” (Kerouac 38)

This passage comes from a collection of short prose works describing Kerouac’s life in San Francisco as a writer. I’ve always enjoyed “The Railroad Earth” because of Jack’s cunning use of language and sound and the way he swam through made it poetic beyond prose. Within the first line, Jack uses first alliteration with “drowse” and “drum”, then switching to assonance with “hum” and “lum mum”—only to then be topped by creating a slant rhyme to “afternoon” with three words, “nathin’ to do”. All of this happens in a beat and may go unnoticed or appear disorderly to the untrained eye. The whole “nathin’ to do” bit really gets me, as I struggle to recall any other writer using such creative authorial intuition to complete the machine-gun effect in line one with a slew of well rehearsed rhymes. Kerouac, having learned English as a second language, had the ability to step back from words and use them in such a way that made each one a key on a piano. His vision of an alley “full of trucks and cars of businesses nearabouts” is enhanced linguistically by the use of cacophony to create the sense of visual raucous with verbal raucous. This passage is just Jack having fun with language, not caring to stick to any poetic form.

Kerouac, Jack. “The Railroad Earth”. The Lonesome Traveler. New York: Grove Press, 1988.

The Railroad Earth