The Machine Will Never Triumph

An Addendum

I have spent much time over the last few months searching for a golden chain of anti-Machine poems written in English since about 1850. I was hoping that I would find many kindred spirits to D. H. Lawrence and Robinson Jeffers. Alas, that is not the case. Despite reading just about every poem of quality written in English since 1850, there is no hidden lineage of anti-Machine poets, and there is not a single other poet of any quality who can come close to D. H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, or R. S. Thomas. It seems those three poets are sui generis and rather than being part of a greater movement against the Machine, they were lone prophets howling in the woods.

When Philip Larkin compiled his anthology of 20th century verse, he realized that one could no longer rely on any sort of natural quality inherent in a poet, but instead one must search the wasteland to find good poems here or there. Good, anti-Machine poetry does exist, but it is the exception rather than the rule, and it tends to be more of a lucky aberration rather than a defining concept in all but a few 19th and 20th century poets.

It seems the Machine has stuck its iron hooks into our collective hearts and souls, so we are not the same as we once were. We are infinitely lower than people from only a few generations ago, but we can’t even discern that clearly. We are lost, and the only god we can believe in is the god of progress, which is a false god, for as William Blake states:

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.¹

We live only for facts, figures, science and technology, all the while creating bigger machines, and vast edifices that are certain to fall down, just as the Tower of Babel collapsed. It is beauty, not science that sustains the soul. Blake prophetically wrote that:

Art is the Tree of Life.
Science is the Tree of Death.²

In fact, we are living in an age of reproductions and reproductions of reproductions, so that not only is there little that is real, but we can no longer separate the real from the unreal, the true from the false. Rather than experiencing the beauty of life, we surround ourselves with the ugliness of death, for that is what all machine-made products are, namely representations of Nothingness. Man the maker, making something by hand works beauty the same way the Divine created all that is, but machines only bring about evil and bring the world closer to an apocalypse. As Wallace Stevens wrote: “Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.”³

In this modern world, we are lost, and we individually and collectively are becoming insane. We think that by creating the next cure or some “miraculous” invention, that it will bring immortality to, if not all people, then at least the select few, but what these modern alchemists don’t understand is that each step closer to physical immortality is a step closer to the annihilation of the soul. Most people today are lost, they are little more than machines. Only a few people remain who burn with the fire of the Divine, but those people face ever increasing hurdles. Oh how one yearns for peace, simplicity and the beauty of nature:

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host
Like shadows in love-frenzied stifled throes—
And yet I am and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams
Where there is neither sense of life or joys
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept,
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.⁴

Sensitive souls can no longer change the world. That is a line we crossed long ago. All one can do now is observe; observe and build an interior castle to fortify the soul against the evil encroachments of modern civilization that would like to control us body, mind, and spirit. We see, even after a few years, all that is beautiful being turned to dust, and it brings us to tears, but there is nothing we can do but watch while the world burns, and scream in rage to the god that allowed this to happen. Trees were once sacred, but now they are nothing, burnt to cinders like the victims of fascism. Charlotte Mew perfectly relates the horror that sensitive souls and divine beings feel at the lost of even a few trees:

They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.
For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall,
The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,
With the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas,’ the loud common talk, the loud common laughs of the men, above it all.

I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.

The week’s work here is as good as done. There is just one bough
On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,
Green and high
And lonely against the sky.
(Down now!—)
And but for that,
If an old dead rat
Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again.

It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness away
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.

It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;
Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying—
But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:
‘Hurt not the trees.’⁵

So, what can we do? Fight the Machine? No, it is too late. Run away to monasteries set up as havens of peace amid the insanity of the modern storms? No, it is doomed to fail. Rananim is a good dream, and it is a necessary dream, but it will never work so long as humans choose evil over good. The only option is to fortify one’s self, and to pray, pray without ceasing to all the Gods. And what better way to pray than with the following words from Siegfried Sassoon:

In breaking of belief in human good;
In slavedom of mankind to the machine;
In havoc of hideous tyranny withstood,
And terror of atomic doom foreseen;
Deliver us from ourselves.

Chained to the wheel of progress uncontrolled;
World masterers with a foolish frightened face;
Loud speakers, leaderless and sceptic-souled;
Aeroplane angels, crashed from glory and grace;
Deliver us from ourselves.

In blood and bone contentiousness of nations,
And commerce’s competitive re-start,
Armed with our marvellous monkey innovations,
And unregenerate still in head and heart;
Deliver us from ourselves.⁶

Yes, deliver us from ourselves, and all of our demented fantasies. It will happen. We will be delivered, but not by our own hands, through our own work, but by the will of the Gods. We will destroy ourselves and the Gods will set in place another cycle of existence. Everything will be renewed, and the Machine will perish, but the souls of the machine-people will be tarnished, so while we wait for the end-times, it is best we strive to separate ourselves from the masses and to lead pure lives, so that we may have clean souls when we move to other realms. Our souls can still be saved, but society can not:

Babylon that was beautiful is Nothing now
Once to the world it tolled a golden bell:
Belshazzar wore its blaze upon his brow;
Ruled; and to ruin fell.
Babylon — a blurred and blinded face of stone —
At dumb Oblivion bragged with trumpets blown;
Teemed, and while merchants throve and prophets dreamed,
Bowed before idols, and was overthrown.

Babylon the merciless, now a name of doom,
Built towers in Time, as we today, for whom
Auguries of self-annihilation loom.⁷

So, with so few people treading such a narrow path, must we be alone? No: when one is with the Gods, one is never alone! Even in the most despondent circumstances a person has the potential to choose God and the good, even if that means going to the halls of the Machine to declare your love of the Divine in all its forms, knowing full well the Machine will grind you down to nothing. R. S. Thomas faced the Machine, and while he didn’t change the world, his words made him a saint:

God looked at space and I appeared,
Rubbing my eyes at what I saw.
The earth smoked, no birds sang;
There were no footprints on the beaches
Of the hot sea, no creatures in it.
God spoke. I hid myself in the side
Of the mountain.
As though born again
I stepped out into the cool dew,
Trying to remember the fire sermon,
Astonished at the mingled chorus
Of weeds and flowers. In the brown bark
Of the trees I saw the many faces
Of life, forms hungry for birth,
Mouthing at me. I held my way
To the light, inspecting my shadow
Boldly; and in the late morning
You, rising towards me out of the depths
Of myself. I took your hand,
Remembering you, and together,
Confederates of the natural day,
We went forth to meet the Machine.⁸

Yes, they are only words, but what else do we have? It is only words, but words mean even more now than before, since there are so few meaningful words being uttered. We live in times of prose, so when a true poet comes along, or even a true poem descends from Heaven, we should rejoice, for it is a gift. Verse is that which giveth and prose is that which taketh away:

Christmas Eve! Five
hundred poets waited, pen
poised above paper,
for the poem to arrive,
bells ringing. It was because
the chimney was too small,
because they had ceased
to believe, the poem passed them
by on its way out
into oblivion, leaving
the doorstep bare
of all but the sky-rhyming
child to whom later
on they would teach prose.⁹

Sometimes the verses are sardonic, sometimes they are accidental lines from an insincere poet, and other times they are coming from a place of anger rather than love. There is a place for all of them. John Betjeman wrote the following:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town—
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half-a-crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.¹⁰

He clearly didn’t want actual violence to happen against the modern town, but he did express the sense of loss, anger and alienation that all feel who are not completely blinded to the evils of modernity. D. H. Lawrence raged at the modern world, but one of the things he raged at most of all were the modern instruments of death and destruction. Every revolution, every war only makes things worse. Nonviolence is the only answer, but collective action is not an answer, so one must simply be a solitary beacon of peace on earth.

No one today can escape the modern world: that is what makes the modern world so utterly nefarious. Even the most primitive among us must make some concessions to modernity just to survive. Of course, one could question the value of staying alive, but the Gods placed us on this planet so it would be foolish to waste our lives. Of course, at some point modernity will win, and we will all be dead:

Encase your legs in nylons,
Bestride your hills with pylons
O age without a soul;
Away with gentle willows
And all the elmy billows
That through your valleys roll.

Let’s say goodbye to hedges
And roads with grassy edges
And winding country lanes;
Let all things travel faster
Where motor-car is master
Till only Speed remains.

Destroy the ancient inn-signs
But strew the roads with tin signs
‘Keep Left,’ ‘M4,’ ‘Keep Out!’
Command, instruction, warning,
Repetitive adorning
The rockeried roundabout;

For every raw obscenity
Must have its small ‘amenity,’
Its patch of shaven green,
And hoardings look a wonder
In banks of floribunda
With floodlights in between.

Leave no old village standing
Which could provide a landing
For aeroplanes to roar,
But spare such cheap defacements
As huts with shattered casements
Unlived-in since the war.

Let no provincial High Street
Which might be your or my street
Look as it used to do,
But let the chain stores place here
Their miles of black glass facia
And traffic thunder through.

And if there is some scenery,
Some unpretentious greenery,
Surviving anywhere,
It does not need protecting
For soon we’ll be erecting
A Power Station there.

When all our roads are lighted
By concrete monsters sited
Like gallows overhead,
Bathed in the yellow vomit
Each monster belches from it,
We’ll know that we are dead.¹¹

But, we will be judged on the quality of our souls, not on how well we resisted the Machine. If we can get through these end times and live to our own individual ends while still being full of love, not of hatred, then we shall dine with the Gods, knowing full well that the Machine has passed into Nothingness. If any still live on earth, things will have changed:

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
“They’ll molder away and be like other loam.”
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers’ land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.¹²

And yet, even if any people remain on earth, the cycle will begin again, and again, and again. It is the nature of people to have the potential for evil. We all have an elemental connection to earth, but rather than becoming tree-like, most people let coal and iron and steel infuse their blood:

From one shaft at Cleator Moor
They mined for coal and iron ore.
This harvest below ground could show
Black and red currants on one tree.

In furnaces they burnt the coal,
The ore was smelted into steel,
And railway lines from end to end
Corseted the bulging land.

Pylons sprouted on the fells,
Stakes were driven in like nails,
And the ploughed fields of Devonshire
Were sliced with the steel of Cleator Moor.

The land waxed fat and greedy too,
It would not share the fruits it grew,
And coal and ore, as sloe and plum,
Lay black and red for jamming time.

The pylons rusted on the fells,
The gutters leaked beside the walls,
And women searched the ebb-tide tracks
For knobs of coal or broken sticks.

But now the pits are wick with men,
Digging like dogs dig for a bone:
For food and life we dig the earth—
In Cleator Moor they dig for death.

Every wagon of cold coal
Is fire to drive a turbine wheel;
Every knuckle of soft ore
A bullet in a soldier’s ear.

The miner at the rockface stands,
With his segged and bleeding hands
Heaps on his head the fiery coal,
And feels the iron in his soul.¹³

Even if the cataclysm comes and only two people survive, they will again descend from Eden and will again create the Machine, which will spawn more Chernobyls, more Fukashimas, and the cycle will continue. The world cannot be saved. Humanity cannot be saved. Everything is doomed:

The toadstool towers infest the shore:
Stink-horns that propagate and spore
Wherever the wind blows.
Scafell looks down from the bracken band
And sees hell in a grain of sand,
And feels the canker itch between his toes.

This is a land where the dirt is clean
And poison pasture, quick and green,
And storm sky, bright and bare;
Where sewers flow with milk, and meat
is carved up for the fire to eat,
And children suffocate in God’s fresh air.¹⁴

But, the individual soul can still be saved through love, and through the grace of a God. The end times are upon us now and are coming faster than you may think. The question you must pose yourself is how to make it from here to God with clean hands. The world is dirty, the Machine is dirty, the people are dirty, and the end is nigh:

I thought it would last my time—
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there’d be false alarms

In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.

Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
—But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more—
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when

You try to get near the sea
In summer…
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn’t going to last,

That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts—
First slum of Europe: a role
It won’t be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won’t be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.¹⁵

But one can still harbor love for the small things:

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.¹⁶

Even a small amount of kindness to the smallest of creatures is a great deed, and exceeds all the great deeds of past kings and saints, because in these times even such small acts of loving-kindness become exceedingly difficult.

Nature is alive, but it resents and hates us for what we have done, what we are doing, and what we have become. The trees don’t hate individual people, but they feel anger and fear towards humanity:

Alone in the woods I felt
The bitter hostility of the sky and the trees
Nature has taught her creatures to hate
Man that fusses and fumes
Unquiet man
As the sap rises in the trees
As the sap paints the trees a violent green
So rises the wrath of Nature’s creatures
At man
So paints the face of Nature a violent green.
Nature is sick at man
Sick at his fuss and fume
Sick at his agonies
Sick at his gaudy mind
That drives his body
Ever more quickly
More and more
In the wrong direction.¹⁷

But as I said before, one solitary individual can be different. One single person can withdraw from much of the stupidity of the modern world and repose in a place of peace and silence. That place has always and will always exist inside us, if we are only so courageous as to look. Stevie Smith puts it well:

Why do people abuse so much our busy age?
They can withdraw into themselves and not rage
It is better to do this and live in one’s own kingdom
Than by raging add to the rage of our busy time.

This is a time when there are too many words,
Silent, silent, silent the waters lie
And the beautiful grass lies silent and this is beautiful,
Why can men then not withdraw and be silent and happy?

It is better to see the grass than write about it
Better to see the water than write a water-song,
Yet both may be painted and a person be happy in the painting,
Can it be that the tongue is cursed, to go so wrong?¹⁸

So for now I will end. I have said enough words. It is time for silence.

1. William Blake, Poems and Prophecies (London: Everyman’s Library, 1991), 50.

2. ibid., 336.

3. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 913.

4. John Clare, Selected Poems, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 282.

5. Charlotte Mew, Selected Poetry and Prose (London: Faber and Faber, 2019), 79–80.

6. Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 189.

7. ibid., 207.

8. R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems (London: Orion Books, 2000), 208.

9. R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2004), 145.

10. John Betjeman, Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 2006), 20–21.

11. ibid., 286–87.

12. Edwin Muir, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 246–47.

13. Norman Nicholson, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 16–17.

14. ibid., 282.

15. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 133–34.

16. ibid., 194.

17. Stevie Smith, The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), 23.

18. ibid., 684.