---

TECHNICAL NOTE: The great majority of the links below are to scanned antique books at the Internet Archive, most of them anthologies. Poems frequently run for several pages; when coming to the apparent end of a poem, turn the page to make sure!

---

• Ireland, William Henry: Best known as a forger of "Shakespearian" plays. Although his later works do not pretend to be ancient, they still gives the impression of having been written by a time-traveller from an earlier century.
  • Stultifera Navis, XXXVIII "Of Foolish Astronomers and Stargazers."

• Johnson, Lionel:
  • Lucretius "Like storms of snow, like quaking sands, // Thine atoms drift through time."

• Jones, Charles C.:
  • An Up-to-Date Reason Parody of the popular Victorian standard I Cannot Sing the Old Songs. In the 1911 spoof, I cannot sing them because I'm busy learning to fly, lest I lose my aviatrix girl-friend.

• Judson, Hanford Chase:
  • Factory Poems The poet takes a blue-collar job, and finds in the factory the same Romantic beauty and sublimity as in Nature.

• Kaufman, Herbert:
  • The Dreadnought
  • De Morte Expresses a strange sort of Darwinian patriotism, contemplating the brevity of human life during the slaughter of the Great War.

• Keats, John:
  • On First Looking into Chapman's Homer: contains an allusion to Herschel's discovery of Uranus.
  • What wreath for Lamia?: From Lamia. Philosophy disenchants the world, as optics has disenchanted the rainbow.

• Keiley, Jarvis:
  • The Song of the Jellyfish

• Kendall, May:
  • Ether Insatiable An ode to that which "fills circumambient space". This could easily be set to music.
  • The Fatal Advertisements Alien astronomers receive wireless broadcasts from Earth and assume the adverts must have some profound meaning.
  • Love and Matter A very clear statement of the Late Victorian cosmic dilemma: what is the role of Love (or any human value) in an apparently Godless universe doomed to a maximum-entropy heat death?
  • A Warning to New Worlds Urges other planets to avoid replicating Earth's unfortunate evolutionary path -- don't even solidify, if you can help it!.

• Kipling, Rudyard:
  • Arithmetic on the Frontier Highly educated officers also die in battle.
  • The Deep-Sea Cables Accidentally Lovecraftean. There is an old musical setting by the classical composer Rutland Boughton, but we cannot find it online.
  • Doctors
  • Farewell and adieu to you, Greenwich ladies Submarine vs. zeppelin in the Great War. (The title / opening line is sometimes given as "Harwich ladies"; the tune is obvious.)
  • The Four Angels The futility of Promethean struggle. Apparently attractive to folk-singers.
    • Musical setting by Tom Blackburn
    • Musical setting by Mark Horning
    • Musical setting by John Ravenscroft
    • Musical setting by Martin Simpson
  • A General Summary Things haven't changed since we were "semi-apes". There is a musical setting by Leslie Fish, but we cannot find it online.
  • The Hymn of Breaking Strain Published in 1935 and technically still under copyright, but it would be absurd not to include what is arguably the greatest engineering poem of all time.
    • Musical setting by Leslie Fish
  • The Inventor A parody of Ralph Waldo Emerson, from The Muse among the Motors.
  • Jubal and Tubal Cain The age-old conflict of technology and fine art.
    • Musical setting by Leslie Fish.
  • McAndrew's Hymn A "dour Scots engineer" addresses a twelve-page soliloquy to God.
    • Musical setting by Leslie Fish equating McAndrew with the Twenty-Third Century's most famous dour Scots engineer. Kipling, who believed that human nature never changes, would have loved this adaptation, reminiscent of his own futuristic novella With the Night Mail.
  • Minesweepers
    • Musical setting by Toby Darling.
  • The Miracles ... of technology, in the service of love. (Or at least I think that's what it's about.)
  • The Muse among the Motors A series of 26 poems about automobiles, written between 1904 and 1929 and parodying famous literary styles.
  • In the Neolithic Age Kipling's famous poem about the nature of art. Its language is borrowed from the technical jargon of Victorian palæoanthropology. There is a musical setting by Leslie Fish, but we cannot find it online.
  • Our Fathers of Old The pros and cons of pre-scientific medicine. In its simultaneous defence of tradition and progress, this is one of the most remarkable science-poems of the long Nineteenth Century.
    • Musical setting by Peter Bellamy
    • Musical setting by Leslie Fish
  • Poseidon's Law Technology changes; mariners don't.
  • The Secret of the Machines Classic technology poem.
  • The Sons of Martha i.e. workers, technicians, engineers. Multiple musical settings exist, but none seem to be online.
  • Tin Fish Submarines in the Great War.
    • Musical setting by Edward Elgar performed by J. Kennedy and J. Duck.
    • The same recorded in 1917 with Elgar himself conducting the orchestra.
  • The Trade British submarines in the Great War.
  • A Truthful Song "How very little since things were made // Things have altered in the building trade."
    • Musical setting by Peter Bellamy

  • ABOUT:
    • Guiterman, Arthur: Rudyard Kipling Not quite the image of Kipling most people have: "I will chant in Lowland Dutch / Of Quaternions and such, / And the boundless Fourth Dimension shall delight to honour ME!"

• Kitahara Hakushû: Leading Japanese poet of the Taishô Era (1912-1926).
  • The Precious Music of Heresy European science as it would have been perceived during the Tokugawa shogunate: the exotic, forbidden wisdom of the West! Ninomiya-Enright translation, 1957: the English text is probably under copyright.

• Lawrence, D. H.:
  • Zeppelin Nights

• Lear, Edward:
  • There was an old man of the Hague

• Leslie, Edgar: American popular song-writer.
  • Come On, Papa "...Hop in ze motor car." (Link to sheet music.)
    • Performed by Avon Comedy Four, 1919
  • He'd Have to Get Under -- Get Out and Get Under (to Fix Up His Automobile) Co-written with Grant Clarke. (Link to sheet music.)
    • Performed by Billy Murray, 1914

• Leverett, Mary E.:
  • A Discovery in Biology Bacteria amoris, the cause of dolor cordis.

• Lindsay, Vachel: As is evident from even the titles of some of the poems below, the "Prairie Troubador" usually comes across as quite hostile to science and technology, but a few of his works are more ambivalent or take the common Romantic position that science will realise its true purpose in the future when it rediscovers the mysterious sublimity of Nature. Lindsay seems to have had enormous stylistic influence on the great Twentieth Century poet-palæontologist Loren Eiseley, but Eiseley, like most of his generation, was far more pessimistic.
  • The Celestial Circus A very powerful love poem which uses some cosmological imagery as a backdrop.
  • Euclid Similar to Whitman's "Learn'd Astronomer".
    • List of Musical Settings [Emily Ezust's Lieder Page]
    • Musical setting by Jake Heggie
  • Factory Windows are Always Broken ... and there's a reason for that.
  • The Horrid Voice of Science That's the original title, although this particular edition tones it down and makes it a sequel to "The Scientific Aspiration" (below). The poem itself is unaltered, and about as anti-science as one can get.
  • A Rhyme About an Electrical Advertising Sign Almost perfectly exemplifies the attitude of many Long Nineteenth Century poets toward science and technology.
  • The Scientific Aspiration A poem that can be read in quite different ways.
  • The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotus "a poem written on the near-completion of the Panama Canal, showing how the genius of the west, here typified by the rose, and the genius of the east, here typified by the lotus, are to be merged and mingled in one."

• Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth:
  • The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz
  • Three Friends of Mine one of them often thought to be Agassiz; see Sonnet III.

• Lowell, Amy:
  • Camouflaged Troop-Ship A cutting-edge technology.
  • The Cyclists Bicyclists as symbols of England's decay in the Spring of 1914.
  • The Fort About the high-tech fortifications in Boston Harbour, and the proximity of Nature.
  • Motor Lights on a Hill Road