Classic Poem

What is this iron music
Whose strains are borne afar?
The hammers of the world-smiths
Are beating out a star.
They build our old world over,
Anew its mould is wrought,
They shape the plastic planet
To models of their thought.
This is the iron music
Whose strains are borne afar;
The hammers of the world-smiths
Are beating out a star.

We hear the whirling sawmill
Within the forest deep;
The wilderness is clipped like wool,
The hills are sheared like sheep.
Down through the fetid fenways
We hear the road machine;
The tangled swamps are tonsured,
The marshes combed and clean.
We see the sprouting cities
Loom o'er the prairie's rim,
And through the inland hilltops
The ocean navies swim.

Across the trellised land-ways
The lifted steamers slide;
Dry shod beneath the rivers
The iron stallions glide;
Beneath the tunnelled city
The lightning chariots flock,
And back and forth their freight of men
Shoot like a shuttlecock.
The moon-led tides are driven back,
Their waves no more are free,
And islands rise from out the main
And cities from the sea.

We see the mountain river
From out its channel torn
And wedded to the desert
That Plenty may be born;
We see the iron roadway
Replace the teamer's rut;
We see the painted village
Grow round the woodman's hut.
Beneath the baffled oceans
The lightning couriers flee;
Across the sundering isthmuses
Is mingled sea with sea.

Smiths of the star unfinished,
This is the work for you,
To hammer down the uneven world —
And there is much to do.
Scoop down that beetling mountain,
And raze that bulging cape;
The world is on your anvil,
Now smite it into shape.
What is this iron music,
Whose strains are borne afar?
The hammers of the world-smiths
Are beating out a star.