The Lay of the Motor-car
The Lay of the Motor-car - meaning Summary
Speed and Comic Menace
The poem celebrates the motor car’s thrilling speed and the driver’s exuberant sense of superiority. It juxtaposes exhilaration with casual violence: animals, pedestrians and authority figures are flattened or expelled as mere obstacles. The tone mixes triumph and dark comedy, especially in the grotesque image of the grocer crushed or scattered by the wheel. Overall, the poem presents modern technology as liberating yet disruptive and callously aggressive toward rural life.
Read Complete AnalysesWe're away! and the wind whistles shrewd In our whiskers and teeth; And the granite-like grey of the road Seems to slide underneath. As an eagle might sweep through the sky, So we sweep through the land; And the pallid pedestrians fly When they hear us at hand. We outpace, we outlast, we outstrip! Not the fast-fleeing hare, Nor the racehorses under the whip, Nor the birds of the air Can compete with our swiftness sublime, Our ease and our grace. We annihilate chickens and time And policemen and space. Do you mind that fat grocer who crossed? How he dropped down to pray In the road when he saw he was lost; How he melted away Underneath, and there rang through the fog His earsplitting squeal As he went -- Is that he or a dog, That stuff on the wheel?
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