The Deep-sea Cables
The Deep-sea Cables - context Summary
Published in 1902
Written amid Kipling’s engagement with modern technology and published in 1902 in The Five Nations, the poem imagines undersea telegraph cables as living ties that carry human messages across the ocean’s mute depths. It presents these lines as a new, unifying "Word" that bridges distances and stirs ancient, hidden powers, turning cold infrastructure into a symbol of human connection and a claim for unity across the globe.
Read Complete AnalysesThe wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar -- Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are. There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep, Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep. Here in the womb of the world -- here on the tie-ribs of earth Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat -- Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth -- For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet. They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time; Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun. Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime, And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"
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