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"A mind's reach should exceed its
grasp, or what's a metaphor?"
       - One Dim Sun Productions

Robert Frost has a poem about a buzz-saw in which the dangerous machine "snarls and rattles, snarls and rattles" in tones of menace, as if an angry wolf or rattling snake. When it hears the cry "Supper!" it leaps out at a boy's hand, and bites it off. We are not told whether it suffered indigestion. In this dark comedy, Frost seems more sympathetic to the hungry saw, than to the dying boy.

Like all Romantics, Frost's first love seems directed toward the mechanical monster he has created (cf. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), the sort of creature which proliferated in many of Disney's early animated cartoons. As the once lively boy breathes out his last "in the dark of ether" (unlike Eliot's "Prufrock," the ether here is literal - it is the night which is metaphoric) Frost delights in having given the world a metaphysical shudder, a warning in the form of an animated buzz-saw, a half-comic rebuke to the worshippers of machine technology, in the time-honored Romantic tradition, which prefers to study causes, not effects.

One might sum it all up in the little epigram concocted by one of Frost's admirers:

Be thou as sharp as a trap
But dull as a wise old saw.

Frost's buzz-saw has teeth of course, and it uses them to cut sweet-smelling sticks of wood for the kitchen stove. What seems today merely metaphoric was once nothing of the kind. In the Neolithic age the first saws and scythes consisted of a curved branch in which were embedded rows of animal teeth. Much technology simply amplified simple bodily functions, as the hammer does the human arm and fist, or the dagger the tooth. But what comes after the Aftermath? Those who know that the -math in this word is the simple medieval past participle of mow will answer, "The Grim Reaper." Thus Frost's buzz-saw mimicks the all-devouring jaw of Death.

The romantic poet loves to animate and personify, perhaps in a quest for new Gods, or neglected ones, and he communicates this preference in the way he approaches images of technology. In his poem "The Submarine," Canadian poet E.J. Pratt, a Newfoundlander by birth, presents his readers with a German submarine conceived of as a viviparous mother tiger-shark. She gives birth to blood-scenting mutinous young, which turns out to be a meticulously technical description of the submarine launching her torpedoes, and mortally wounding an Allied ship. Driven by turbines at fifty miles an hour, their underwater speed makes this naval disaster a foregone conclusion. And then,

The submarine, like the deep-sea shark,
Went under cover, away from the light

Unlike the Romantic, the Modern poet uses technological imagery very differently. Pratt has also written a poem "The Shark," whose imagery is modern rather than romantic. It does not look for organic equivalents of the technological, but just the opposite, technical images for a living shark. Its style is in the Imagist tradition of Chicago's Carl Sandburg. The shark's dorsal fin is described as:

Like a piece of sheet-iron,
Three-cornered,
And with knife-edge
Stirred not a bubble

In the next stanza we are told:

His body was tubular
And tapered
And smoke-blue

       almost like the barrel of a rifle, or the great grey guns of a battle-ship. It possesses

... a double row of white teeth
And eyes of metallic grey
Hard and narrowed and slit

Then out of the harbour
With that three-cornered fin
Shearing without a bubble the water
Tubular, tapered, smoke-blue

Why do Romantic writers personify technology? Why do Modern writers robotize it? Perhaps because one group of writers is studying its causes, and the other its effects on human culture and the human psyche. Is it because some Romantic writers worship technology? Consider Walt Whitman's and Stephen Spender's panegyrics on the steam locomotive. Do they view the creators and custodians of such power as little less than Gods? Adam was promised divine status by the serpent, and his descendants immediately set about building the first cities, and the tower of Babylon.

Is it because modern writers, only too well aware of the ravages of industrial machinery on those who shape and serve it, are more interested in that technology's effects on people and on human culture? And how is it that we are only beginning to be aware of this, one hundred and fifty years after the first modern poems of Baudelaire and Dickinson? In the new electric age of instant information, we no longer live in an industrial or even pre-industrial environment. It is much easier to see things after they have disappeared. The horseless carriage is now called the car. The hookless fastener is now known as the zipper.

Sharks had fins long before submarines and torpedoes acquired them, not to mention zeppelins and rockets. Why do cars have fins? Is it for the same reason that the young have rejected the winged feet of Mercury, for the rocket swoosh of a sports shoe named after an anti-aircraft missile of the 50's known as the Nike? And if cars have fins (or once had, in the 60's), why can't sharks have steering wheels?*

The Romantic writer sees nature as a metaphor, in much the same way that the Modern sees technology. Metaphors carry us across a gap. They build bridges. They explain things, by setting up analogical models of reality, as Aristotle tells us. And so the person who lives in a technological world has need of technical metaphors.

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*     For the Romantic, a fast-moving carriage "flies like the wind." For the modern, G.K. Chesterton in this instance, "The wind round the old street corner / Swung sudden and quick as a cab."