I Like to See It Lap the Miles

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).