The tympanum! The tympanum!

Oh! who will save the aural drum

By softening to some gentler squeak

The whistle's shrill staccato shriek?

Oh! Engine-driver, did you know

How your blast smites one like a blow,

An inward shock, a racking strain,

A knife-like thrust of poignant pain,

Whilst groping through the tunnel murk

You would not with that fiendish jerk

Let out that sudden blast of steam

Whose screaming almost makes us scream

Thy whistle weird perchance may be

A sad and sore necessity,

But cannot Law and sense combine

To—well, in short to draw the line?—

Across the open let it shrill

From moor to moor, from hill to hill,

But in the tunnel's crypt-like gloom,

The station's cramped reverberant room,

A gentler, graduated blast!

Do let it loose, whilst dashing past,

So shall it spare us many a pang;

That dread explosive bursting "bang"

Which nearly splits the aural drum,

The poor long-suffering tympanum!