ive to a man, and a pill-box full of
dynamite, with a spark creeping toward it, is not.

That depends partly on the man and partly on the spark. A man may not
be impressed by a pill-box full of dynamite and a spark creeping
toward it, the first time he sees it, but the second time he sees it,
if he has time, he is impressed enough. He does not stand and
criticise the lack of expression in pill-boxes, nor wait to remember
the day when he all but lost his life because

A pill-box by the river's brim
A simple pill-box was to him
And nothing more.

Wordsworth in these memorable lines has summed up and brought to an
issue the whole matter of poetry in machinery. Everything has its
language, and the power of feeling what a thing means, by the way it
looks, is a matter of experience--of learning the language. The
language is there. The fact that the language of the machine is a new
language, and a strangely subtle one, does not prove that it is not a
language, that its symbolism is not good, and that there is not poetry
in machinery.

The inventor need not be troubled because in making his machine it
does not seem to express. It is written that neither you nor I,
comrade nor God, nor any man, nor any man's machine, nor God's
machine, in this world shall express or be expressed. If it is the
meaning of life to us to be expressed in it, to be all-expressed, we
are indeed sorry, dumb, plaintive creatures dotting a star awhile,
creeping about on it, warmed by a heater ninety-five million miles
away. The machine of the universe itself, does not express its
Inventor. It does not even express the men who are under it. The
ninety-five millionth mile waits on us silently, at the doorways of
our souls night and day, and we wait on IT. Is it not THERE? Is it not
HERE--this ninety-five millionth mile? It is ours. It runs in our
veins. Why should Man--a being who can live forever in a day, who is
born of a boundless birth, who takes for his fireside the
immeasurable--express or expect to be expressed? What we would like to
be--even what we are--who can say? Our music is an apostrophe to
dumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly, resistlessly on, over
the pantomime within us. We and our machines, both, hewing away on the
infinite, beckon and are still.

I am not troubled because the machines do not seem to express
themselves. I do not know that they can express themselves. I know
that when the day is over, and strength is