The Motor-Lorries
The Motor-Lorries
Original Text
John Swinnerton Phillimore, Things New and Old (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918): 79. Widener Library, Harvard University
1They're coming -- twenty or thirty, an outspun throng
2 Of grey machines, none hard on the other's heels.
3 You hold your breath till all are past: it feels
4As if the gathering loudness, lunged along,
5And then the diminuendo thundersong
6 Of each grey bulk on elephantine wheels
7 Were sobs of one great heart, gaspèd appeals
8By irresistible iteration strong;
9-- Or piston-strokes whose rhythm obeys the pulse
10 Of some Necessity-made-visible,
11 Some grimly lustrous engine, errorless,
12Inhuman. Six and thirty! They convulse
13 The countryside ... Is this an interval?
14 Or is it the end? O aching emptiness!
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2005
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