Dives found a mighty silence; and he missed the throb and leap,
The noise of all the sleepless creatures singing him to sleep.
And he said: "A screw has fallen--or a bolt has slipped aside--
Some little thing has shifted": and the little things replied:

"Call upon the wheels, master, call upon the wheels;
We are taking rest, master, finding how it feels,
Strict the law of thine and mine: theft we ever shun--
All the wheels are thine, master--tell the wheels to run!
Yea, the Wheels are mighty gods--set them going then!
We are only men, master, have you heard of men?

"O, they live on earth like fishes, and a gasp is all their breath.
God for empty honours only gave them death and scorn of death,
And you walk the worms for carpet and you tread a stone that squeals--
Only, God that made them worms did not make them wheels.
Man shall shut his heart against you and you shall not find the spring.
Man who wills the thing he wants not, the intolerable thing--
Once he likes his empty belly better than your empty head
Earth and heaven are dumb before him: he is stronger than the dead.

"Call upon the wheels, master, call upon the wheels,
Steel is beneath your hand, stone beneath your heels,
Steel will never laugh aloud, hearing what we heard,
Stone will never break its heart, mad with hope deferred--
Men of tact that arbitrate, slow reform that heals--
Save the stinking grease, master, save it for the wheels.

"King Dives in the garden, we have naught to give or hold--
(Even while the baby came alive the rotten sticks were sold.)
The savage knows a cavern and the peasants keep a plot,
Of all the things that men have had--lo! we have them not.
Not a scrap of earth where ants could lay their eggs--
Only this poor lump of earth that walks about on legs--
Only this poor wandering mansion, only these two walking trees.
Only hands and hearts and stomachs--what have you to do with these?
You have engines big and burnished, tall beyond our fathers' ken,
Why should you make peace and traffic with such feeble folk as men?

"Call upon the wheels, master, call upon the wheels,
They are deaf to demagogues, deaf to crude appeals;
Are our hands our own, master?--how the doctors doubt!
Are our legs our own, master? wheels can run without--
Prove the p