Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Turbine

By Harriet Monroe

LOOK at her—there she sits upon her throne

As ladylike and quiet as a nun!

But if you cross her—whew! her thunderbolts

Will shake the earth! She’s proud as any queen,

The beauty—knows her royal business too,

To light the world, and does it night by night

When her gay lord, the sun, gives up his job.

I am her slave; I wake and watch and run

From dark till dawn beside her. All the while

She hums there softly, purring with delight

Because men bring the riches of the earth

To feed her hungry fires. I do her will

And dare not disobey, for her right hand

Is power, her left is terror, and her anger

Is havoc. Look—if I but lay a wire

Across the terminals of yonder switch

She’ll burst her windings, rip her casings off,

And shriek till envious Hell shoots up its flames,

Shattering her very throne. And all her people,

The laboring, trampling, dreaming crowds out there—

Fools and the wise who look to her for light—

Will walk in darkness through the liquid night

Submerged.

Sometimes I wonder why she stoops

To be my friend—oh yes, who talks to me

And sings away my loneliness; my friend

Though I am trivial and she sublime.

Hard-hearted?—No, tender and pitiful,

As all the great are. Every arrogant grief

She comforts quietly, and all my joys

Dance to her measures through the tolerant night.

She talks to me, tells me her troubles too,

Just as I tell her mine. Perhaps she feels

An ache deep down—that agonizing stab

Of grit grating her bearings; then her voice

Changes its tune, it wails and calls to me

To soothe her anguish, and I run, her slave,

Probe like a surgeon and relieve the pain.

We have our jokes too, little mockeries

That no one else in all the swarming world

Would see the point of. She will laugh at me

To show her power: maybe her carbon packings

Leak steam, and I run madly back and forth

To keep the infernal fiends from breaking loose:

Suddenly she will throttle them herself

And chuckle softly, far above me there,

At my alarms.

But there are moments—hush!—

When my turn comes; her slave can be her master,

Conquering her he serves. For she’s a woman,

Gets bored there on her throne, tired of herself,

Tingles with power that turns to wantonness.

Suddenly something’s wrong—she laughs at me,

Bedevils the frail wires with some mad caress

That thrills blind space, calls down ten thousand lightnings

To ruin her pomp and set her spirit free.

Then with this puny hand, swift as her threat,

Must I beat back the chaos, hold in leash

Destructive furies, rescue her—even her—

From the fierce rashness of her truant mood,

And make me lord of far and near a moment,

Startling the mystery. Last night I did it—

Alone here with my hand upon her heart

I faced the mounting fiends and whipped them down;

And never a wink from the long file of lamps

Betrayed her to the world.

So there she sits,

Mounted on all the ages, at the peak

Of time. The first man dreamed of light, and dug

The sodden ignorance away, and cursed

The darkness; young primeval races dragged

Foundation stones, and piled into the void

Rage and desire; the Greek mounted and sang

Promethean songs and lit a signal fire:

The Roman bent his iron will to forge

Deep furnaces; slow epochs riveted

With hope the secret chambers: till at last

We, you and I, this living age of ours,

A new-winged Mercury, out of the skies

Filch the wild spirit of light, and chain him there

To do her will forever.

Look, my friend,

Here is a sign! What is this crystal sphere—

This little bulb of glass I lightly lift,

This iridescent bubble a child might blow

Out of its brazen pipe to hold the sun—

What strange toy is it? In my hand it lies

Cold and inert, its puny artery—

That curling cobweb film—ashen and dead.

But now—a twist or two—let it but touch

The hem, far trailing, of my lady’s robe,

And look, the burning life-blood of the stars

Leaps to its heart, and glows against the dark,

Kindling the world.

Even so I touch her garment,

Her servant through the quiet night; and thus

I lay my hand upon the Pleiades

And feel their throb of fire. Grandly she gives

To me unworthy; woman inscrutable,

Scatters her splendors through my darkness, leads me

Far out into the workshop of the worlds.

There I can feel those infinite energies

Our little earth just gnaws at through the ether,

And see the light our sunshine hides. Out there,

Close to the heart of fife, I am at peace.