I like to see it lap the Miles
Emily Dickinson
I like to see it lap the Miles -
And lick the Valleys up -
And stop to feed itself at Tanks -
And then - prodigious step
Around a Pile of Mountains -
And supercilious peer
In Shanties - by the sides of Roads -
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its Ribs
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid - hooting stanza -
Then chase itself down Hill -
And neigh like Boanerges -
Then - punctual as a Star
Stop - docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door -
Many poets recoiled in horror and anxiety from the new machinery of the nineteenth century, but the locomotive found adherents in Whitman (who wrote a poem called "To a Locomotive in Winter") and Dickinson, who needed the figurative arsenal of the New Testament to reinforce the metaphor of the Iron Horse.