Across the twilight swamp beyond the lake,
Moves like a caravan or glimmering snake
(With siren whistle on the evening air
Out to the low mists and the first high stars
And crossroads brown and bare), —
Moves on from woods to woods the train of cars.

Are those her own lights in a fiery line?
Or does the great sun still
Through some deep hollow of a western hill
Upon her far panes shine?

A train so often touches me with wonder ...

She comes from mighty places of the earth,
With canyons and black waters under;
She crawled up mountains, and she leapt the firth;
She skirted cataracts, with her own thunder.
She plunged into the regions of the rain
That crossed her iron course,
And in an hour out she fared again
With nothing lost of all her flame and force.
She cut through ice-age and moraine,
Round bends of blasted outcrop autumn-vined,
Through limestone tunnels of the paleozoic,
Then puffed her clouds to clouds above the plain,
In overplus of all her stress and strain,
Unconscious, blind —
And yet a thing heroic
With her long wails, like triumph over pain.

What monsters of the elder earth
With sagging bellies of tremendous girth
Traversed such rolling spaces far? —
And yet the forces of her moving are
Of still more ancient birth:
Not sluggish feed of oozy fern and grass,
But sun's own fire and cosmic steam and gas.

She came from mighty places, and she goes
(Far from my window here and me),
Whatever lightning flares or tempest blows,
On to the mightiest the round earth knows —
Head onward to the sea:

Past orchards, of their apples shorn
(Empty of all but of the robin's empty nest),
Ponds, pastures, quarries, and sawn stumps of trees,
Or where the stacks of tented corn
Upon the stubble prairie rest
Like rows of Indian old tepees.

Past more than these:
Past the coke-ovens burning into morn,
And the long houses of the factories;
Past the suburban marshes and gray dumps,
And scraggly willow clumps,
Past picture-boards with their grotesqueries —
Their lettered lure of promised hopes —
Cigars, cathartics, soaps, —
Past here and there a college on a hill,
And the white cupolas for telescopes.

Things man has done or will.

These will she pass or has already passed,
To come at last,
The dust and soot upon her plates and shards,
With shriek and clanging bell,
With puff-balls from reverberant pulsations,
Into the midnight coruscations
Of the Yards —
Where end the rails she rode so long and well,
In caverned spots of green and white and red,
And blotches of huge shadows, quick or dead,
And thousand shimmering wires crisscross overhead,
And poles with zigzag arm or horizontal spar.

Here her prodigious sisters are ...

And from her sides she belches then,
By hundreds, men — and men — and men,
With empires in the brain,
Empires of gold, of sword, of voice, of pen,
Of love or heresy or hate, —
The which, expanding in the rhythmic sway
Of her large motions through the night and day,
The continental train
Herself did half, or more than half, create!