Notes on Journey – The Poem is not on the website.
This is a car journey on a wet night along narrow country roads. I am the passenger. We can see nothing but the road ahead. It is like a tunnel, and the driver could be a miner, (metaphor). The physical journey is also the journey of a relationship that might be ending, ‘a mineral (metaphor: coal) relationship in the dark.’ The headlights pick up objects beside the road: the ‘churns waiting for morning’ are milk churns delivered to the farm gates to wait collection by the milk tanker. Cream rises to the top in the churn, leaving the thin milk below. As passenger I submit to whatever happens. All this is supported by the language of the poem.