Car Poem – The Automobile

Car Poem: The Automobile
[as it originally appeared in the Feburary 1901 edition of The Automobile magazine]

Did you think that I came from the hand of man.
That I sprang from a human brain?
Did you think that a genius drew my plan
And ‘stablished my earthly reign?
The genii back of the ancient night
Were sponsors upon my birth,
And I was born of the wings of light
For a wingless course on earth.

In city street or in country lane
They hover when I go by;
They draw my life from the bolted chain,
From mastered flame of the sky;
The bolts and rivets and bars and wheels
May labor and rock and roar,
But the will of the genii through me steals
And the leagues behind me soar!

I am a dream of the things men thought
When the high gods walked the world,
When Hercules at his labors wrought
And the bolts of the anvils hurled
Their song of might in the morning light
Of the dawning strength of man,
And the seas were poured from left to right,
And the earliest rivers ran!

I slept an age in the beaming sun,
I rocked in the ocean’s lap,
I followed the path that the lightnings run,
I laid for eons to nap
On the breast of the wind of the whirling spheres
In the molten cradles I lay —
A babe of the immemorial years
Born out of the Past for To-day.

I am one with the wind of the surging storm,
And one with the summer calm;
I yield my will to the powers that form
My speed to a woman’s hand;
A child may master by levered Eorce,
As docile and meek 1 smile
At the ancient shadow they called a horse.
And cherished for speed and style!

But ever the breath of the blast is mine,
And my veins are bolts of flame;
Unseen, they follow with eyes that shine,
That genii from whence I came —
The gnomes of the air and the eerie souls
That breathed on the brain of man
And gave him the key to the force that rolls
Through the artifice of my plan.

Wingless, yet winged with the ancient dream,
Fired with the ancient fire,
I come from the bourne of the lightning’s beam
At the call of the new desire!
I type the progress of force and thought,
The need of the later time,
Whose arch is based where the high gods wrought
In the flush of their potent prime.

Borne with the dream, that may yet come true,
Of ships with the speed of light
Sailing the seas of the central blue
To ports of the starry night,
I take the road or the crowded street,
The hill or the level plain,
I, and the genii who follow fleet,
In the pride of our earthly reign! — (Ex.)