The Full Text of “I like to see it lap the Miles”
1I like to see it lap the Miles —
2And lick the Valleys up —
3And stop to feed itself at Tanks —
4And then — prodigious step
5Around a Pile of Mountains —
6And supercilious peer
7In Shanties — by the sides of Roads —
8And then a Quarry pare
9To fit its sides
10And crawl between
11Complaining all the while
12In horrid — hooting stanza —
13Then chase itself down Hill —
14And neigh like Boanerges —
15Then — prompter than a Star
16Stop — docile and omnipotent
17At its own stable door —
The Full Text of “I like to see it lap the Miles”
1I like to see it lap the Miles —
2And lick the Valleys up —
3And stop to feed itself at Tanks —
4And then — prodigious step
5Around a Pile of Mountains —
6And supercilious peer
7In Shanties — by the sides of Roads —
8And then a Quarry pare
9To fit its sides
10And crawl between
11Complaining all the while
12In horrid — hooting stanza —
13Then chase itself down Hill —
14And neigh like Boanerges —
15Then — prompter than a Star
16Stop — docile and omnipotent
17At its own stable door —
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“I like to see it lap the Miles” Introduction
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Emily Dickinson wrote "I like to see it lap the Miles" sometime between 1858 and 1862. The poem describes a steam train as it travels through the surrounding landscape. Imagining the train as a giant horse, the speaker marvels at its wild and unrivaled strength, speed, and power. The poem never explicitly names its main subject, taking on a riddle-like quality also found in Dickinson poems like "A Route of Evanescence" and "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass."
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“I like to see it lap the Miles” Summary
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I like to watch a steam train traveling great distances in a loop. It zooms through valleys as if consuming them, and stops to refuel at fuel tanks. Then, with an almighty stride, it goes around a group of mountains.
It looks down on small, impoverished towns built up by the sides of roads.
Then it goes through a quarry, seeming to carve the land to fit around it, and making a lot of noise as it does so. With abrasive cries, the train-horse rushes downhill.
It calls with all the volume and passion of biblical apostles. Finally, like a star appearing reliably in the sky, it comes to a rest. Passive yet powerful, the train-horse sits in its stable.
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“I like to see it lap the Miles” Themes
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The Wonder of Technology
In "I like to see it lap the Miles," the speaker marvels at the sight of a steam train making its way through the landscape. Likening the train (a relatively new invention at the time) to a peculiar horse, the poem conveys the power and novelty of this technological innovation. As the speaker sees it, technology's ability to tame and dominate nature—and its sheer strangeness—is mind-boggling, awe-inspiring, and a little threatening.
At the time, steam trains were known colloquially as iron horses. The speaker takes this image and runs with it, evoking an atmosphere of excitement and mystery. The speaker never calls the train a train. Instead, the train is metaphorically transformed into a horse (albeit one unlike any real horse that has come before). It eats, drinks, plays, and rests—just as an animal does. Before railroads came along, horses were the main mode of transport for long distances, so the comparison of the train to a horse-like creature suggests just how hard it is to fit this new beast into an existing understanding of the world. Whereas horses are familiar to the speaker, this train-horse is anything but!
Part of the train's strangeness comes from its sheer power. As it speeds across the countryside, it’s equal parts captivating and intimidating. It seems to have an appetite for the landscape itself, gobbling up "Miles" and drinking up "the Valleys." And there's some literal truth in this idea—the landscape has been transformed to suit the needs of the train. The train has its own "Tanks" and man-made tunnels, and tracks allow it to "step / Around a Pile of Mountains" with ease. New technology, then, exerts its strength and will on the world around it. The poem captures this power by comparing the train-horse's "neigh" (that is, the shriek of its whistle) to the intense and electrifying words of a biblical preacher ("like Boanerges"). The train is loud, but also weirdly compelling, like a leader or visionary—a prophet of a new world to come.
Overall, then, the speaker doesn't quite know yet what to think about the train. It certainly inspires awe, even pleasure, but it’s subtly threatening, too. The speaker knows that the invention of the steam train reflects a larger societal change, stemming from technological innovation and industrialization, but the exact nature of this change remains to be seen. That may be why the train-horse seems to sneer—"supercilious"—at the "Shanties" (impoverished little towns) along the roadsides. It's as though the train senses that it heralds a new, mechanized way of life. Similar overtones surround the closing image of the train-horse at rest in its "stable" (station). Here, it appears both "docile"—because it's peacefully still, and because it obeys human commands—and "omnipotent," because it signals the arrival of an era of machine-based, superhuman strength.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “I like to see it lap the Miles”
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Lines 1-2
I like to see it lap the Miles —
And lick the Valleys up —Spoiler alert: this is a riddle-like poem about a steam train! Dickinson wrote a number of poems that conceal their main subject, like fun language puzzles. But, of course, there's more to the poem than just figuring out its subject.
The first line begins the extended metaphor, which treats the train kind of like a horse—albeit a weird kind of super-horse. ("Iron horse" was once a common nickname for a steam locomotive.) As though watching the train/horse from a window, the speaker marvels at how it covers great distances quickly and with little effort. It seems to consume the landscape with an insatiable appetite. The word "lap" can mean both traveling around a circuit (which is how trains work) and lapping up a drink (like a kitten enjoying a bowl of milk). Note how the many slippery, slurping /l/ sounds, in the form of both alliteration and consonance, seem to evoke that hunger itself:
I like to see it lap the Miles —
And lick the Valleys up —The steady common measure, typical of Dickinson's poetry, gives the poem a strong forward momentum. Common measure just means that the lines alternate between iambic tetramer and iambic trimeter. An iamb is a poetic foot with an unstressed-stressed beat pattern; tetrameter means there are four of these iambs in a line (for eight beats total) while trimeter means there are three (six beats total):
I like | to see | it lap | the Miles —
And lick | the Val- | leys up —Once again, the poem's sound matches its imagery: it's as if the poem itself takes on the speed and power of the train-horse, racing towards its conclusion (with a few brief train-like stops along the way).
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Lines 3-5
And stop to feed itself at Tanks —
And then — prodigious step
Around a Pile of Mountains — -
Lines 6-7
And supercilious peer
In Shanties — by the sides of Roads — -
Lines 8-12
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its sides
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid — hooting stanza — -
Lines 13-14
Then chase itself down Hill —
And neigh like Boanerges — -
Lines 15-17
Then — prompter than a Star
Stop — docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door —
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“I like to see it lap the Miles” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration helps bring the poem's extended metaphor—which imagines a steam train as a surreal horse-like creature—to life on the page. In the first stanza, the speaker marvels at how the train seems to gobble and drink up the landscape:
I like to see it lap the Miles —
And lick the Valleys up —Here, alliteration imposes itself on the poetic line as powerfully as the train imposes itself on its environment. The /l/ sound also makes the reader perform a lapping/licking motion with the tongue. (Try saying these lines out loud to hear this effect.)
The train-horse is as noisy as it is fast. As it travels, it makes a noise described in line 12 as a "horrid — hooting stanza." This refers to the train's whistle, which echoes across the landscape. Again, the alliteration is intentionally brash and emphatic, capturing the train's startling sound. The /h/ sound is breathy, too, making the reader exhale air, just like the train blowing off steam. (Other repeated consonants in the poem—such as the /p/ in words like "prodigious," "Pile," and "peer" and the hard /c/ sound in "crawl" and "Complaining"—are hard plosives that also help capture the racket the train is making.)
In lines 15-16, alliteration signals the end of the train's journey:
Then — prompter than a Star
Stop — docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door —Even coming to a stop, the train makes a lot of noise. The repeated /st/ sound evokes the halting of the train as it brakes. Also, /t/ is a "stop" consonant: when you pronounce it, your tongue blocks your airflow. Another example, then, of the poem's sound matching its imagery!
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Allusion
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Anaphora
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Extended Metaphor
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Simile
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"I like to see it lap the Miles" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Lap
- Tanks
- Prodigious
- Supercilious
- Peer
- Shanties
- Quarry
- Pare
- Boanerges
- Prompter
- Docile
- Omnipotent
- Stable
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To travel in a circuit. Also, to drink (like a cat from a bowl).
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “I like to see it lap the Miles”
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Form
"I like to see it lap the Miles" has three quatrains and one quintet. The quatrains are typical of Dickinson's poetry. Combined with the iambic meter (the poem's steady da-DUM rhythm), they give the poem a formal regularity that mimics the mechanistic motion of the train itself.
The third stanza, though, effectively splits its first line in half, turning the quatrain into a quintet (a five-line stanza). Formally, this fits with the image of the train "par[ing]" down the quarry to "fit its sides" (in other words, going through a tunnel). The lines get narrower as the train squeezes through a narrow passage. This variation also introduces a touch of unpredictability, suggesting that the train—though a force tamed by humans, like a powerful horse—has a bit of wildness to it. (Note that some printed versions of the poem combine lines 9 and 10 into a single line, thus maintaining the poem's quatrain form throughout. Dickinson spaces them apart in her handwritten original, however.)
The poem uses a loose version of the common meter (quatrains of alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines) typically found in ballads. Besides being a modified ballad, the poem resembles a riddle. It employs the "What am I?" technique, describing its main subject without ever naming it explicitly.
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Meter
The poem uses a loose version of Dickinson's typical ballad meter (a.k.a. common meter): quatrains of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines. This means that lines switch between four iambs (eight beats total) and three iambs (six beats total).
Consistent iambs (metrical units that follow a da-DUM pattern) give the poem a regular rhythm, mimicking the mechanistic regularity of the train itself. Consider the first two lines:
I like | to see | it lap | the Miles —
And lick | the Val- | leys up —However, only the first stanza is set in perfect common meter; the others all contain three trimeter lines rather than two. Again the poem's regularity, like the train's, contains a hint of wildness.
In the third stanza, the poem "pare[s]" itself down—that is, makes itself narrower—to match the image of the train passing through a narrow tunnel. Line 9 effectively splits into lines 9 and 10, dividing the iambic tetrameter into two lines of iambic diameter (meaning they have just two iambs, two da-DUMs).
Another notable variation is the stressed "Stop" at the start of line 16 (normally this syllable would be unstressed). For a moment, it brings the poem to an abrupt and surprising halt.
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Rhyme Scheme
For the most part, the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme. This means that the poem's rhyme scheme look like this:
ABCB
This scheme gives the poem a steady, dependable sense of momentum that perhaps evokes the steady, dependable momentum of a train. (The pattern changes slightly in the third stanza, however, simply because line 9 is broken into two lines.)
The rhyme pairs—"up"/"step," "peer"/"pare," "while"/"Hill," "Star"/"door"—are not perfect rhymes but slant rhymes (another typical feature of Dickinson's poetry). These slant rhymes help evoke the train's combination of predictability and wildness. On the one hand, a rhyme scheme needs a certain regularity in order to work, much as a train needs tracks and a schedule in order to run. (Also, tracks often come in pairs, just like the rhymes here.) On the other hand, slant rhyme opens up a wider set of possible word choices than perfect rhyme, much as this steam train seems wild and powerful enough to open up new horizons.
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“I like to see it lap the Miles” Speaker
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The reader doesn't learn much about the speaker, because the poem isn't about the speaker: it's about the train!
That said, everything is filtered through the speaker's first-person perspective. The poem's central metaphor—the train as a horse—thus comes from the speaker's own feelings towards the train. The speaker finds it exciting, mysterious, and even a little intimidating. As the speaker says in line 1, they "like" watching the train. At the same time, they see that it has some negative elements: it looks "supercilious" next to the humble "Shanties," and its whistle is "horrid."
The speaker also avoids naming the train explicitly, creating a sort of riddle by concealing the poem's main subject. This makes the poem itself exciting and mysterious.
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“I like to see it lap the Miles” Setting
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"I like to see it lap the Miles" is a very visual poem: the speaker watches the steam train from afar—possibly from a window—and can follow its entire course as it makes a circuit of the tracks. Mountains, valleys, rail stations ("Tanks"), roadside shanties, and a quarry are all visible. This setting helps demonstrate how the train (or railroad) imposes its presence on its surroundings, seeming to shape the land to its needs rather than tailoring its course to the land.
In lines 4 and 5, for example, the train goes around a "Pile of Mountains" with a mere "step." For most travelers at the time, mountains would have seemed like a serious obstacle! On the one hand, this effect is a kind of optical illusion created by the speaker's distant perspective. On the other hand, it contains a great deal of truth: with the widespread adoption of train travel in the 19th century, tracks were laid all over America, changing the landscape and making even the largest obstacles seem smaller.
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Literary and Historical Context of “I like to see it lap the Miles”
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Literary Context
Emily Dickinson is one of the most significant poets in the English language, but she published very little during her lifetime. She lived a famously reclusive life in Amherst, Massachusetts from 1830 to 1886. This poem was probably written between 1858 and 1862 and was first published in the 1890s. The publishers, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, rather gave the game away by assigning the poem a title: "The Railway Train."
Of course, the poem (which Dickinson did not title) intentionally hides its main subject, never mentioning the train or the tracks explicitly. It has a riddle-like quality, challenging the reader to decipher what it's talking about. Dickinson wrote a number of poems in a similar mode and often sent them to her younger cousins, Frances and Louisa Norcross. Other Dickinson riddle-poems include "His Bill an Augur," "A Route of Evanescence," and "A narrow Fellow in the Grass."
This riddle-poem plays on the expression "iron horse," a slang term for steam trains that was popular in 19th-century America and Britain. In its focus on modern technology, "I like to see it lap the Miles" is a rarity in Dickinson's poetry. Her poems (which number nearly 1800) tend to act as an escape from or rejection of the modern world, employing more timeless settings and universal themes. This partly explains their enduring quality.
Trains—and the new era they represented—were a popular subject for writers at the time. Another example from American poetry is "What's the railroad to me?" by Henry David Thoreau. One of Dickinson's major influences, the essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote that "Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water." This poem similarly observes technology's ability to transform the American landscape.
Historical Context
Coincidentally, Dickinson was born in the same year (1830) as the most famous test run of an American-built steam engine. This engine, Tom Thumb, was pitted against a horse-drawn carriage in a race. Although it lost, trains soon outpaced horses and became a significant mode of travel. The American landscape was already crosshatched with railroads, used to aid the transportation of horse-drawn wagons, so travel by steam train grew out of this existing infrastructure. In the 19th century, steam engines were colloquially known as "iron horses"—most likely the inspiration behind Dickinson's choice of metaphor in this poem.
Dickinson's hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts acquired its first railway station in 1853. Dickinson's father, Edward—who variously served as a state legislator, Congressman, and treasurer of Amherst College—was instrumental in the effort to bring the railroad to Amherst. From her window, Dickinson could see the station and the passage of the trains. In fact, the "Pile of Mountains" in line 5 might well be the Holyoke Range she would have seen on the horizon.
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More “I like to see it lap the Miles” Resources
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External Resources
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In Our Time Podcast — Experts talk about Emily Dickinson's life and work on the BBC's In Our Time podcast/radio show.
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Dickinson's Biography — A valuable Dickinson resource from the Poetry Foundation.
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A History of the Steam Train — A look at the story behind this much-loved mode of transport.
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The Dickinson Museum — The Emily Dickinson Museum, situated in the poet's old house, offers many resources for students.
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A Dickinson Documentary — Watch a short educational film on Dickinson's life and poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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