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!
General and Various ---
Automobiles ---
Aviation and Space Travel
(on their own page)
---
Steam Power, Railways, Canals
---
Submarines
---
Telegraphy, Telephone, Wireless, and Other Communications
(on their own page)
---
People
---
Back to Main Subject Index
- TECHNOLOGY: General and Various:
- Anonymous:
Oh, gas may escape
A sort of Omar Khayyam in the Industrial Age limerick.
- Anonymous:
Spenser Describeth a Grass-Cutting Machine
- Bailey, Philip James:
Much you aver is true
But the modern poet should accept
his age, and not "rail at railroads".
- Belloc, Hilaire:
George
"The moral is that little Boys // Should
not be given dangerous toys."
- Belloc, Hilaire:
Newdigate Poem:
"A Prize Poem Submitted by Mr. Lambkin of Burford
to the Examiners of the University of Oxford on the
Prescribed Poetic Theme Set by Them in 1893, The
Benefits of the Electric Light." (Lambkin was one of
Belloc's satiric personæ.)
- Binyon, Laurence:
The Wharf on Thames-side: Winter Dawn
Urban Romanticism.
- Lord Byron:
Song of the Luddites
with whom Byron strongly sympathised.
- Chesterton, G. K.:
For Four Guilds
Although Chesterton
opposed Industrial Revolution capitalism, he did not reject
technology as such: he wanted it to be humane and spiritual, as
he supposed it to have been in the Middle Ages.
- Chesterton, G. K.:
King's Cross Station
Which will someday be a ruin.
- Chesterton, G. K.:
The Song of the Wheels
"You have engines big and burnished, tall beyond our fathers' ken //
Why should you make peace, and traffic with such feeble folk as men?"
- Clough, Arthur Hugh:
Dipsychus, II, iv: Ah, if I had a course ...
The problem of life in the Industrial Age: one is only a cog in
someone else's machine.
- Coughlin, William J.:
Uker
A long, very strange poem with embedded songs.
- Däubler, Theodor:
Das Nordlicht
An epic poem which is both a critique of technological society and
the elaboration of a pseudo-scientific mythology involving the aurora,
lava-pools, and the sun.
- Davidson, John:
The Crystal Palace
This long and vivid
poem begins with a description of
Sir Hiram Maxim's Captive Flying Machines, ancestor of
countless later carnival rides and of NASA's training devices. It goes on
to decry the ugly new architecture of steel and glass which
the Crystal Palace pioneered and the psychological effect of
the Exhibition on visitors: "Thus, passive all // Like savages bewitched,
submit at last // To be the dupes of pleasure, sadly gay."
- Davidson, John:
Eclogues
ARTIST: "I mean that electricity and steam have set a
barbarous fence about the earth, and made the oceans and
the continents preserved estates of crafty gather-alls."
VOTARY: "We are fire, cut off and cooled a while, and shall
return ... to be again candescent in the sun ... Arise and let
us sing; and, singing, build a tabernacle even with these ghastly
bones."
- Davidson, John:
The Feast of St. Martha
Four characters debate the
pros and cons of technology. Includes the interesting lines
"The earth itself is now inspired // It knows delight, it feels
distress // Ten thousand wires and nerves unwired // Have given the
globe self-consciousness."
- Davidson, John:
Fleet Street
"... was once a silence in the ether." This rather
amazing poem depicts all of the street's history, from the formation
of the solar system until the Edwardian Age, coexisting in a single Now.
The discussion of the chemical elements anticipates the "we are
star-stuff" rhetoric of Carl Sagan -- but then, a little disappointingly,
turns it into mild social satire.
- Duganne, Augustine:
The Artisan
From The Iron Harp.
- Elliott, Ebenezer:
Steam at Sheffield
The Romantic poet should awaken to the wonders of the Industrial Age.
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo:
Wealth
On matter, evolution, and technology.
- Foley, J. W.:
Nemesis
Mild anti-technology (or really anti-bad design) satire.
- Hardy, Thomas:
The Convergence of the Twain:
Written immediately after the siniking of the Titanic.
- Hayne, Paul Hamilton:
A Thousand Years from Now
Technological progress; the immensity of time; love conquers all.
- Hillyer, William Hurd:
The Revenge of the Forest
- Hillyer, William Hurd:
The Ruined Engine
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
In the Twilight
The aging poet wonders what technological and
religious developments will transform
the world in the centuries after his death.
Includes a comic refutation of Ecclesiastes' "nothing new under the sun":
Were nations coupled with a wire? // Did Tarshish telegraph to
Tyre?
- Hunt, Leigh:
The Trumpets of Doolkarnein
One of Western literature's few attempts to tackle the famous
Near Eastern legend of the lost advanced technology of Alexander.
- 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.
- Kipling, Rudyard:
The Four Angels
The futility of Promethean struggle. Apparently attractive to folk-singers.
- Kipling, Rudyard:
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.
- Kipling, Rudyard:
The Inventor
A parody of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
from The Muse among the Motors.
- Kipling, Rudyard:
Jubal and Tubal Cain
The age-old conflict of technology and fine art.
- Kipling, Rudyard:
McAndrew's Hymn
A "dour Scots engineer" addresses a twelve-page soliloquy to God.
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.
Kipling, Rudyard:
The Miracles
... of technology, in the service of love. (Or at least I think that's what it's about.)
Kipling, Rudyard:
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.
Kipling, Rudyard:
Poseidon's Law
Technology changes; mariners don't.
Kipling, Rudyard:
The Secret of the Machines
Classic technology poem.
Kipling, Rudyard:
The Sons of Martha
i.e. workers, technicians, engineers. Multiple musical settings exist,
but
none seem to be online.
Kipling, Rudyard:
A Truthful Song
"How very little since things were made // Things have altered in the building trade."
Lindsay, Vachel:
Factory Windows are Always Broken ... and there's a reason
for that.
Lindsay, Vachel:
A Rhyme About an Electrical Advertising Sign Almost perfectly
exemplifies the attitude of many Long Nineteenth Century poets
toward science and technology.
Lowell, Amy:
The Cyclists Bicyclists as symbols of England's decay in the
Spring of 1914.
Lowell, Amy:
The Fort
About the high-tech fortifications in
Boston Harbour, and the proximity of Nature.
MacKaye, Percy:
The Arc Light
The untitled poem on the following page ("She stood before a
florist's window pane ... ") may be part of the same work.
MacKaye, Percy:
Edison
Phonograph, moving-picture camera, stock-ticker and so on are
valuable only if they point to some transcendent realm, or at least
not to evil. Fortunately, Edison has good intentions.
Malone, Walter:
Dynamite
is a force for liberation of the enslaved.
Malone, Walter:
Hernando De Soto, Book VI
and
Book XXII.
Hernando De Soto is an epic poem, 592 pages long, about the
conquistador's exploits on both American continents. One of the major
characters, Codro, is an omniscient wizard-scientist. Here he foretells the
coming of the industrialised US.
Markham, Edwin:
The Mighty Hundred Years
An hymn to the Nineteenth Century.
Masefield, John:
The Blacksmith
A very complex and interesting poem; I don't know how to summarise it.
Masefield, John:
Cargoes
Modern technology is unromantic.
a YouTube performer
Musical setting by Martin Shaw performed by R. Malcolm.
Masters, Edgar Lee:
Scholfield Huxley: People create wonderful things: science, technology, art ...
They almost touch God. Then they die anyway.
Masters, Edgar Lee:
Walter Simmons: Wrongly thought, even by himself, to be a genius.
Meredith, George:
The World's Advance
Progress is a spiral. Includes a description of a drunkard's
random walk.
Mifflin, Lloyd:
The Dawn of Science in the Twentieth Century
Who knows what is coming?
Monroe, Harriet:
For Peace
Peace is the goal of all technology, even military technology.
Written shortly before the Great War.
Monroe, Harriet:
A Power-Plant
The Fisk Street turbine power station in Chicago, considered as a temple.
Monroe, Harriet:
The Turbine
as a queenly woman; the engineer as her lover.
Noel, Roden:
Livingstone in Africa, Canto V
Livingstone contemplates the stars, and later imagines a Christian
and industrialised (but not Europeanised) Africa.
Palgrave, William Gifford:
A Vision of Life, Book III, Canto X
"Those misled by Science: their doom is to dwell in a world such
as they planned."
Canto XI follows this with an attack on British technology,
"contrasted with the charm of
pure and unspoiled Nature". Canto XII condemns the railroad
and the telegraph (which
broke "the bonds wisely set between nations"). Cantos XIII and
XIV tell a sort of
Atlantis myth: a scientific utopia is destroyed by its own
arrogance.
Phillips, Stephen:
The Aeroplane
Against not just aircraft but technology in general.
Phillips, Stephen:
The Doom of Sails
"Now dispossessed by the stern and stunted ironclad // Wingless and
squat and stern."
Phillips, Stephen:
A Nightmare of London
swallowing all of England.
Phillips, Stephen:
The Submarine
"This man-built menace of the sea."
Rankine, W.J.M.: Iron
'A geological, economical, and patriotic song.'
Rankine, W.J.M.: What Shall We Do for Coal?
Britons will muddle through. A song about the impending global energy crisis, to the tune 'Jolly Good Ale and Old'.
Riley, James Whitcomb:
The Squirt-Gun Uncle Maked Me
I guess this counts as a technology poem.
Roberts, C. G. D.:
Brooklyn Bridge
Sandburg, Carl:
Chicago
Now such a famous poem that it's hard to read.
Sandburg, Carl:
John Ericsson Day Memorial, 1918
This poem is not about Ericsson the man, but about the role of technology
in the Allied victory.
Sandburg, Carl:
Leather Leggings
What next, now that the Earth has been explored? "Under the sea
and out to the stars we go."
Sandburg, Carl:
New Farm Tractor
Sandburg, Carl:
Prayers of Steel
that it be made into part of a skyscraper.
Sandburg, Carl:
Skyscraper
Sandburg, Carl:
The Skyscraper Loves Night
Sandburg was a bit obsessed with skyscrapers.
Sandburg, Carl:
Smoke Nights
A cycle of poems.
Sill, Edward Rowland:
The Clocks of Gnoster-Town
A rather heavy-handed satire, with some technological imagery and
references to statistics.
Stedman, Edmund Clarence:
Fin de Siècle
A more Romantic science may restore the beauty Nineteenth-Century
scientific materialism has destroyed.
Stephen, James Kenneth:
Steam-Launches on the Thames
Dreadful things; they ruin punting.
Stephen, James Kenneth:
Of W. W. (Britannicus):
"Poetic lamentation on the insufficiency of steam locomotion in the
Lake District": a satire written during the Thirlmere waterworks
environmental controversy of the 1880s.
Tabb, Fr. John Bannister:
Bicycles! Tricycles!
A pun.
Taylor, Bert Leston:
The Old Roller Towel: An example of technological change which rarely
comes to mind.
Tennyson:
Locksley Hall and
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After
In part, a prescient vision of the Twentieth Century future.
Thompson, Francis:
The Nineteenth Century
The century of Science, war, imperialism, etc. Will the Twentieth be better?
Thornely, Thomas:
Ode to a Steam-Roller in the Lake District
Tourists are apalled, but the poet isn't. I am unable to decide
whether or not this
poem is meant to be taken seriously; the same is true
of the even more florid piece that immediately
follows it in the anthology,
To the Founder of the Aërated Bread Co., Ltd..
Thornely, Thomas:
Thirlmere Waterworks A criticism of the famously controversial
Lake District dam project. The Thirlmere Reservoir is arguably
the birthplace of British environmentalism.
Tilton, Theodore:
Tempora Mutantur
We now ride bicycles, not horses.
Trowbridge, John Townsend:
Darius Green and His Flying Machine
Immensely popular anti-technology satire,
today remembered for the lines: 'Birds can fly // An' why can't I?'
Turner, Rev. Charles Tennyson:
The Hydraulic Ram The sound of a machine influences
the speaker's psychology. One of Turner's more interesting poems.
Turner, Rev. Charles Tennyson:
Old Ruralities
Nostalgia for the pre-industrial world -- a less common
theme in Nineteenth Century verse than is often supposed.
Turner, Rev. Charles Tennyson:
The South-Foreland Electric Light
Technology is a symbol of England's unique
greatness! Turner wrote several poems with this message.
Very, Jones:
The Camphene Lamp
is a fire-hazard, and a typical example of bad technology!
Webster, Augusta:
An Inventor
... dying with his work unfinished.
White, Henry Kirke:
Clifton Grove
White's best-known poem, praising (although somewhat ambivalently) the countryside and contrasting it (p. 2) with the town where 'manufacture taints the ambient skies' and the soul of the 'pale mechanic'.
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler:
The Mill "Great and devastating as are the evils connected
with child and woman labor in mills and factories, there must be many a
man and woman who finds happiness in the work which these maunfactories
afford."
Wilson, Edmund Jr.:
Death of an Efficiency Expert Part of
The Undertaker's Garland, a
book of morbidly comic rhymed verse that young Wilson and
his friend John Peale Bishop wrote upon their return from the Great War.
Wynne, Annette:
It Must Have Been Quite Queer
to have lived before autos, airplanes, or trollies, as did George Washington.
TECHNOLOGY: Automobiles
- Anonymous:
Some Psalm
- Belloc, Hilaire:
Hildebrand "... who was frightened by a passing motor."
- Bryan, Vincent P.:
In My Merry Oldsmobile
Perhaps the most famous early motoring song.
- Davidson, John:
The Testament of Sir Simon Simplex concerning Automobilism
Trains promoted democracy and socialism, but the automobile will
restore aristocratic individualism. Although this is
clearly a satire, it isn't obvious from the poems where Davidson's
political sympathies lay.
- Guiterman, Arthur:
The Quest of the Car
Pseudo-folkloric ballad
about buying an automobile.
- Guiterman, Arthur:
A Tract for Autos
Parody of inspirational verse for children,
but addressed to motor-cars.
- Henley, W. E.:
A Song of Speed
Driving fast in a Mercedes as
mystical experience.
- Kipling, Rudyard:
The Muse among the Motors
A series of 26 poems about automobiles, written between 1904 and 1929
and parodying famous literary styles.
- Leslie, Edgar:
Come On, Papa
"...Hop in ze motor car." (Link to sheet music.)
- Leslie, Edgar:
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.)
- Lowell, Amy:
Motor Lights on a Hill Road
- MacKaye, Percy:
The Automobile: A First Ride, 1904
- Sandburg, Carl:
Portrait of a Motor Car
- Taylor, Bert Leston:
Blake Comes Back
"Little Ford, who made thee?"
- Wynne, Annette:
It Must Have Been Quite Queer
to have lived before autos, airplanes, or trollies, as did George Washington.
TECHNOLOGY: Steam Power, Canals, Etc.
- Anderson, J. Redwood:
The Bridge
About a railroad bridge.
- Bailey, Philip James:
Much you aver is true
But the modern poet should accept
his age, and not "rail at railroads".
- Barnes, William:
The Railroad
Written in Dorset dialect.
- Bungay, George W.:
The Locomotive
A metaphor for political reform.
- Clark, Lewis Gaylord:
A Rail-Road Lyric
- Davidson, John:
Railway Stations
Turns a trip by rail around Greater London
into a spiritual odyssey.
- Elliott, Ebenezer:
Epitaph
For Henry Bell, unrewarded steamship pioneer.
- Elliott, Ebenezer:
Steam at Sheffield
The Romantic poet should awaken to the wonders of the Industrial Age.
- Elliott, Ebenezer:
Verses on the Opening of the Sheffield and Rotherham Railway
On the failure of social justice to keep pace with technology.
- Gerberding, Elizabeth:
The Canal
"Hail to the mighty thought that cleft a continent in twain!"
- Harte, Bret:
What the Engines Said
at the opening of the Pacific Railroad.
- Hogg, James:
The Morning Star, or the Steam-Boat of Alloa
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
The Steamboat
"See how yon flaming herald treads // The ridged and
rolling waves ..."
- Kipling, Rudyard:
McAndrew's Hymn
A "dour Scots engineer" addresses a twelve-page soliloquy to God.
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.
Kipling, Rudyard:
Poseidon's Law
Technology changes; mariners don't.
Lindsay, Vachel:
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."
MacKaye, Percy:
Goethals God's sub-creator! The engineer-as-poet theme is
interesting.
MacKaye, Percy:
Panama Hymn
Malone, Walter:
The Union of the Seas.
"On the Completion of the Panama Canal".
Masefield, John:
Cargoes
Modern technology is unromantic.
a YouTube performer
Musical setting by Martin Shaw performed by R. Malcolm.
Melville, Herman:
A Rail Road Cutting near Alexandria in 1855
The feats of Watts are more impressive than the Pyramids (which
Melville seems to place near Alexandria).
Monroe, Harriet:
Our Canal
"To Colonel Goethals and the Other Laborers in the Canal Zone."
Expresses the messianic and utopian idealism of American
engineers, but (the envoi suggests) with reservations about
how things will actually turn out.
Noel, Roden:
The Signalman
About a terrible 1892 railway accident, caused by the error of an
overworked and ill-treated signalman.
Palgrave, William Gifford:
A Vision of Life, Book III, Canto X
"Those misled by Science: their doom is to dwell in a world such
as they planned."
Canto XI follows this with an attack on British technology,
"contrasted with the charm of
pure and unspoiled Nature". Canto XII condemns the railroad
and the telegraph (which
broke "the bonds wisely set between nations"). Cantos XIII and
XIV tell a sort of
Atlantis myth: a scientific utopia is destroyed by its own
arrogance.
Rankine, W.J.M.: The Engine-Driver to his Engine
To the tune of'The Iron Horse'.
Rice, Roswell:
The Iron Horse
An anti-railroad poem? At least anti-railroad investment schemes.
Riley, James Whitcomb:
The Iron Horse
Roberts, C. G. D.:
On the Elevated Railway at 110th Street
Ruskin, John:
The Steam Engine
(In the footnote.) Ruskin's first poem, written as a child.
Sandburg, Carl:
Halsted Street Car
Sandburg, Carl:
Limited
About a limited express train.
Sandburg, Carl:
Subway
Sandburg, Carl:
Window
of a moving train at night.
Stephen, James Kenneth:
Steam-Launches on the Thames
Dreadful things; they ruin punting.
Stephen, James Kenneth:
Of W. W. (Britannicus):
"Poetic lamentation on the insufficiency of steam locomotion in the
Lake District": a satire written during the Thirlmere waterworks
environmental controversy of the 1880s.
Stevenson, Robert Louis:
From a Railway Carriage
Ostensibly from a child's point of view, but capturing the sensations
of many a Nineteenth Century adult.
Stone, T. N.:
A Rhymster's Dream
"After a supper and meeting to extend Cape Cod Railroad
to Provincetown."
Taylor, Bert Leston:
Ballad of the Clark Street Cable meaning the kind of cable that pulls
a streetcar.
Thoreau, Henry David:
What's the Railroad to Me?
From Walden, Chapter IV.
Very, Jones:
The Railroad as a John the Baptist image.
Whitman, Walt:
To a Locomotive in Winter "Type of the modern! emblem of
motion and power! For once, come serve the Muse."
Wynne, Annette:
It Must Have Been Quite Queer
to have lived before autos, airplanes, or trollies, as did George Washington.
SUBMARINES
- Kipling, Rudyard:
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.)
- Kipling, Rudyard:
Tin Fish
Submarines in the Great War.
performed by J. Kennedy and J. Duck.
-
The same
recorded in 1917 with Elgar himself conducting the orchestra.
Kipling, Rudyard:
The Trade
British submarines in the Great War.
Phillips, Stephen:
The Submarine
"This man-built menace of the sea."
White, Henry Kirke:
The Wonderful Juggler
About Napoleon, who has plans for submarines and war balloons.
ENGINEERS AND INVENTORS:
- BELL, HENRY: Unrewarded steam-ship pioneer.
For Henry Bell.
EDISON, THOMAS: Considered a sort of demi-god by many at
the close of the Century.
Phonograph, moving-picture camera, stock-ticker and so on are
valuable only if they point to some transcendent realm, or at least
not to evil. Fortunately, Edison has good intentions.
ERICSSON, JOHN: One of the Nineteenth Century's
foremost engineers (and a
pioneer of solar and
other relatively clean energy systems),
he was idolised in America for having
designed the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor.
This poem is not about Ericsson the man, but about the role of technology
in the Allied victory.
GOETHALS, G. W.:
A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.
God's sub-creator! The engineer-as-poet theme is
interesting.
Monroe, Harriet:
Our Canal
"To Colonel Goethals and the Other Laborers in the Canal Zone."
Expresses the messianic and utopian idealism of American
engineers, but (the envoi suggests) with reservations about
how things will actually turn out.
MARCONI, GUGLIELMO:
STEPHENSON, GEORGE:
To the tune of'The Iron Horse'.
WRIGHT BROS.:
Written on witnessing Wilbur Wright's flight from Governor's Island to Grant's Tomb and
back, 1909 October 4.
ZEPPELIN, FERDINAND von:
Wartime anti-German poem.
