I Like to See It Lap the Miles
18 pages • 36-minute read
Emily DickinsonI Like to See It Lap the Miles
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Themes
The Transgressive Force of Technology
Dickinson conveys the seemingly unstoppable movement that the development and advancement of technology brings. The personification and extended metaphor of the train as a horse underscore its voracity, its capacity for replacing previous methods of transportation, and the tenuous grip of the people attempting to tame it as they have animals in the past.
As a horse, the speaker sees the train “lap the Miles” and “lick the Valley” (Lines 1-2)—a monster capable of swallowing the landscape. It then takes a “prodigious step // Around a Pile of Mountains” (Lines 4-5). The diction indicates brawny boundlessness; unlike its animal comparison, the train can leap seemingly impenetrable obstacles due to its superior strength, traverse miles of land without tiring, and run up the valleys as easily as a tongue licking up food. While the train is not completely invincible—the word “crawl” (Line 10) suggests weakness or lack of development—it also is resourceful, capable of shifting its shape and movement style in a way that a horse cannot. Not only can it take giant steps around mountains, but it can also slither through them. Routinely, the train bests its environment.
The train transcends categories, upending the demarcation between animal and machine when Dickinson gives it the traits of a horse, crossing the line into insectoid crawling, and assuming human behavior when it snobbishly looks down on the “Shanties” (Line 7). At the same time, when the train is “prompter than a Star” (Line 15), the train’s identity includes the celestial. Finally, the train verges into the spiritual, sounding like “Boanerges” (Line 14).
The poem’s metaphors thus mash together machine, horse, human, and nature into a single, transgressive entity.
Malleability and Weakness
The train’s engineering achievement is its adaptability. Part of what makes the train mighty is its agile approach to traversing the land. The speaker labels the train “omnipotent” (16), but what really sets it apart from the transportation technologies that preceded it is that the train’s many different kinds of movement depend on its surroundings. The train can greedily “lap the Miles” (Line 1), then delicately “lick the Valleys” (Line 2). With a “prodigious step” (Line 4), the train maneuvers around mountains, or it can “crawl between” them (Line 10). The train thus demonstrates the nimbleness of technological innovation.
Conversely, the train is also helpless and domesticated. The train must “crawl” when its environment is potentially dangerous or complicated to travel through. Only people, through “a Quarry pare,” can help the train “fit” (Lines 8-9) into the landscape. When running, the train sounds out of breath, and its “Complaining” is “horrid” and “hooting” (Lines 11-12). Once it has finished its run, the train is an unhoused dependent, retreating into “it’s own stable door” (Line 17) like a tame beast of burden. The train has no self-mastery—it cannot run wild like a horse. Rather, like all technology, it is a “docile” (Line 16) worker, serving the needs of the people who produce and use it.
The Concealment of Humanity
Aside from the speaker’s “I” (Line 1) and the “Boanerges” reference (Line 14), there are no people visible in the poem. The speaker is enigmatic and doesn’t have a name. The biblical Boanerges—either apostles or the abstract “sons of thunder”—are more spiritual referents than living people. And even when people manifest in the poem, their presence is elusive.
While the train commandeers the spotlight, those who have made its existence possible are absent. The train’s advanced machinery captivates the speaker, who endows it with human traits. But this personification obscures the actual human labor responsible. The exuberant tone suggests the thrill of watching technology surmount the world. Only the speaker’s equal pleasure in seeing the human in people’s inventions gestures toward a human-centric view.
The minimization of people hides the costs of technological innovation and foregrounds human frailty. On their own, people lack the power to “lap the Miles” or “lick the Valley” (Lines 1-2). To travel around the country, they need the train. However, they are also the ones who built the railroads that sustain this new kind of travel. The workers who laid track and assembled the cars often received unjust treatment. They were enslaved people, immigrants, and Indigenous people—marginalized groups that the people in power often deemed disposable. The marvel of the train hides human suffering and looks away from the egregious dynamic that produced America’s railroads.
Dickinson’s train is an awe-inspiring image that mostly ignores the violent, lethal context. At the same time, Dickinson includes a hint that technology isn’t a panacea. The “Shanties” (Lines 7) are the homes of people from a low socioeconomic class; they’ve been built next to the tracks because that land is less desirable and thus cheaper. Just as the speaker looks down at the train from her position of vista and privilege, the train looks down on the shabby shacks. The implication is that technology’s main priority is to enrich people who already have resources and advantages.
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