A boy, I'd cycle with my thoughts for friend,
Lured to the distant factories at town's-end ...
Out where the chugging tractor patched the road
Before you cross the river at the bend.

Those houses ... they were long and red and low,
With endless windows, all one barren row ...
And sometimes there would be, I think, in each
A bended head with neither nod nor speech;
And sometimes pallid profiles, to and fro;
And sometimes windows, even in the day,
All lighted with a lurid inner glow
That swept the pallid profiles quite away. . . .

Inside the whirring halls and windowed wings,
One afternoon I saw the awful things, —
And touched the men who didn't seem afraid,
Whatever flared, or swung, or whirled, or roared ...

Those houses ... not like houses in our ward ...
A sense of Something mighty being made
That must have been begun so long ago ...
I thought it would be big enough when done ...
Some parts perhaps were ready down below ...
To heave up half our highways in the sun
And lay us others, terrible and new,
To other places, known as yet to none ...

To-day some older persons think so too.