I Like To See It Lap The Miles - Analysis

A Machine Reimagined as a Creature You Can Watch

The poem’s central move is bold and playful: it treats a train as if it were an animal, and by doing so it makes industrial power feel both intimate and uncanny. The speaker begins with a private pleasure—I like to see—as though this is a familiar spectacle from a window or a roadside. But what she likes is not merely speed or modernity; she likes the train’s strange half-living behavior: it lap[s] the miles, lick[s] the valleys up, and feed[s] itself at tanks. Those verbs don’t just decorate the scene. They insist that the machine is being understood through appetite, motion, and temperament—through a body.

The tone, at first, is delighted and slightly mischievous. The train is not praised with solemn awe; it is watched the way you’d watch a powerful animal doing ordinary things: drinking, stepping around obstacles, poking its head where it shouldn’t. That pleasure is important because it keeps the poem from becoming a simple hymn to progress. The speaker’s enjoyment includes a hint of suspicion: this thing is impressive, but also odd, and a little too alive.

Eating the Landscape: Lap, Lick, Feed

The earliest images make the train’s movement feel like consumption. To lap the miles turns distance into something a tongue can gather up; to lick the valleys up makes the land seem edible. Even the stop is rendered as feeding: it pauses at tanks the way an animal drinks. That choice matters because it changes the meaning of travel. The train isn’t just passing through a landscape; it is taking the landscape into its own rhythm, reducing mountains and valleys to units of appetite and performance.

Yet the hunger is not framed as cruelty. The verbs are tactile and almost affectionate, like a cat drinking milk. Dickinson lets the same act be both charming and invasive: the train’s mouthiness suggests desire, but it also hints at how modern motion can swallow space. The tension here is subtle: the speaker’s pleasure depends on a kind of domination of the terrain, even as she describes it with childlike relish.

Big Manners: Prodigious and Supercilious

Once the train begins to navigate the larger geography, Dickinson gives it social traits, not just animal ones. It can step Around a pile of mountains, an exaggeration that makes the mountains seem like clutter on a floor. Then it becomes supercilious, stopping to peer / In shanties by the sides of roads. That word choice brings class and attitude into the picture. The train is not merely powerful; it is haughty—able to look in on poor dwellings without belonging to them.

This is one of the poem’s sharpest little barbs. The train’s glance into the shanties feels like a drive-by inspection, a technological aristocrat moving past lives that are stuck on the margins. The speaker doesn’t explicitly condemn it, but the precision of supercilious makes the moment sting. The machine’s mobility creates a new kind of social distance: it can visit without entering, witness without stopping, and then move on.

The Squeezing Passage: When Power Starts to Complain

A noticeable turn arrives when the landscape pushes back. The train can step around mountains, but it also must be accommodated: a quarry pare is made To fit its sides. The verb pare suggests shaving or trimming, as though the earth is being cut down to suit this metal body. The poem’s earlier animal fantasy now reveals something harder: the creature’s passage is engineered, forced, and extractive. Nature is not simply traveled through; it is reshaped.

And in that narrowed space the train becomes less charming. It crawl[s] between, Complaining all the while in horrid, hooting stanza. The word stanza quietly turns the train’s noise into a kind of brutal poetry—rhythmic, repeated, unmistakable. The speaker still frames it in imaginative language, but the mood darkens: what was licking and feeding becomes hooting and complaint. The train’s voice is not the gentle sound of a domesticated animal; it is loud enough to be called horrid.

Thunder as a Voice: Neigh like Boanerges

After the squeeze comes release: Then chase itself down hill. The train is suddenly self-propelling in a more dramatic way, almost possessed—chase itself suggests a divided creature, hunter and hunted in one. Then it neigh, but not like a normal horse: it neighs like Boanerges, the biblical nickname meaning sons of thunder. That reference intensifies the sound into something prophetic and violent, as if the train speaks with a storm’s authority.

This is where Dickinson’s personification stops being merely cute and becomes frighteningly grand. The train is not just an animal; it’s a kind of modern thunder—a manmade force that mimics ancient power. Yet the poem doesn’t linger in terror. It pivots quickly from thunder to precision.

Cosmic Punctuality: Docile and omnipotent

The ending’s calm is almost eerie: punctual as a star, the train stops at its own stable door. The comparison to a star is striking because it shifts the train from animal to cosmos. Stars are distant, regular, indifferent—unbothered by shanties or quarries. To call the train star-punctual makes it feel woven into a larger, impersonal order. And then Dickinson snaps it back into domestic language: a stable, a door, a place where a powerful creature is put away.

The final contradiction—Stop–docile and omnipotent–—is the poem’s verdict. The train is omnipotent in its ability to cross valleys, command mountains, and demand the earth be pared to fit it. But it is also docile because it obeys schedules, rails, and endpoints. Dickinson makes the modern wonder feel like a pet you can stable, even as it remains too strong to be truly mastered. The poem’s pleasure, then, is not simple admiration: it is the thrill of watching something immense submit to a routine.

A Question the Poem Won’t Let Go Of

If the train can be both docile and omnipotent, what does that make the humans who built it and rely on it? The poem keeps sliding between control and awe: the train drinks at tanks and stops at doors, yet it also peer[s] into shanties and makes the quarry pare the world. Dickinson’s creature feels tamed—until its hooting and thunder remind us it is only obedient within the boundaries it has already forced into being.