I Like to See It Lap the Miles,
I Like to See It Lap the Miles, - fact Summary
Dickinson's Train Fascination
This short lyric vividly personifies a locomotive, portraying its movement as animalistic, proud, and almost divine while also strangely domesticated. The poem traces a train lapping miles, feeding at tanks, climbing and squeezing through landscape, hooting and neighing, then returning “punctual as a star” to its stable. The energetic, paradoxical voice compresses industrial power and everyday routine into a single, concentrated image. It reflects Emily Dickinson’s mid-19th-century fascination with trains and the way technological forces intruded on rural American life.
Read Complete AnalysesI 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 sides, 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.
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