Source: Project Gutenberg eBook #12242, Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
Source URL: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12242
Public domain basis: Complete text of the three posthumous series edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson (1890, 1891, 1896), with their editorial titles and regularized punctuation. Public domain.
Coverage: Complete individual poem extracted from parent edition poems-of-emily-dickinson at bytes 60557-61043; checksum 3f1b6306e16f5fdf4143e26d4e728176f1a125ba9692cf6b47ea3590a62b3f72.


# I Like to See It Lap the Miles

XVII.

THE RAILWAY TRAIN.

I like to see it lap the miles,
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.