I like to see it lap the Miles (43) Lyrics
And lick the valleys up
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step
Around a pile of mountains
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare
To fit its sides, and crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill
And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star
Stop—docile and omnipotent—
At its own stable door.
About
“I like to see it lap the Miles” has remained commonly read, but of Dickinson’s famous poems is among the least well-received.
Criticism of the poem often notes a sense of ease rather than the usual tension in Dickinson’s poems and the relatively simplicity of the poem in comparison to other more challenging and rewarding Dickinson pieces.
However, the poem is a riddle; it is not clear initially what the “it” is, until it becomes obvious that it is a train. The reader is left wondering if the speaker is excited and exhilerated by this mechanism that devours everything in its path, or if it is a pessimistic commentary on nineteenth century industrialisation.
Structure
The poem comprises four quatrains, that is stanzas of four lines each. There is a simple ABCB rhyme scheme. The metrical rhythm is made up of alternating iambic tetrameters — that is four metrical feet, each foot comprising an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable — and iambic trimeters, that is three metrical feet per line.
Language and Imagery
The voice is that of a first person speaker who addresses the reader or an unseen companion. The poem is unusual in that there are few dashes apart from the final stanza, and no capitalised nouns.
The train is zoomorphised, like an “iron horse”, the name given to trains when they first appeared. It “complains”, is “docile”, it “neighs”, until it arrives at “its own stable door”.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning