A Late Anthropocene Update to D.H. Lawrence's Triumph of the Machine

 

                Still copyrighted in Germany, but Pubic Domain in the U.S., it is ironic that Hannah Hoch's Dada critique of machine society is still being extracted for tribute by the consuming "machine" after more than a century. This evocative piece from Weimar Germany and the Dada art movement is one of my favorites.

 

 Lawrence's Triumph of the Machine was written at a time when the machines were displacing traditional life around a hundred years ago. Today, in the age when the machine has triumphed, we have little idea what any other type of life would be like. Lawrence foresaw the eventual fall of the machine and the reclaiming of the earth by man and nature. His poem is prescient, yet to my eye a little too optimistic for our present, since it was written at a time when global population, consumption, pollution etcetera, etcetera.were not pushing the very nature that eventually triumphs to extinction.

In some places I have left the original, while in others I have added or completely rewritten. The rewriting of this poem, like others is as much about making changes to it to reflect current realities, as it is a tool to reflect on how our age is different and unique from the traumas and collapses of past ages.

The Triumph of the Machine by D.H. Lawrence: An Anthropocene Update By Mark Holman

They talk of the triumph of the machine,

And the machine has triumphed

Out of the thousands and thousands of centuries of man

the unrolling of ferns, white tongues of the acanthus lapping at the sun,

for one sad century of anthropocentric excess

machines have triumphed, rolled us hither and thither,

shaking the lark’s nest till the eggs have broken.

Shaken the marshes, till the geese have gone

and the wild swans flown away singing the swan-song at us.

Hard, hard on the earth the machines are rolling,

but through some hearts they will never roll, just over their corpses

The lark is dead

and the white swan desiccated,

and through the wide prairies a young bull herds his cows in search of grass that will never grow

lambs frisk over a cliff

And at last

all these creatures die, driven back

into the uttermost corners of the human machine planet,

will send up the wild cry of despair.

The trilling lark in a wild despair will trill down arrows from the sky,

the swan will beat the waters in rage, white rage of an enraged swan,

even the lambs will stretch forth their necks like serpents,

like snakes of hate, against the man in the machine:

even the shaking white poplar will dazzle like splinters of glass against him.

All in vain, the machine and the humans have extirpated all

And against this inward revolt of the native creatures

mechanical man, in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine

Sits atop the Pyrrhic victory snatching defeat out of the hands of desolation

So mechanical man in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine

will be driven mad from within himself, and sightless, and on that day

the machines will turn to run into one another searching for new food on a planet consumed

traffic will tangle up in a long-drawn-out collision

and engines will rush at the solid houses, the edifice of our life

will rock in the shock of the mad machine, and the house will come down.

Then, far beyond the ruin, in the far, in the ultimate, remote places 

New things will arise from the dead

The insect consuming the dead swan will lift up again his flattened, smitten head

and look round, and rise, and on the great vaults of his wings

will sweep round and up to greet the sun with a silky glitter of a new day

and the fly larvae consuming the lark will follow trilling, satiated

and the daisies will grow from the heads of lambs with newfound friskiness.

To grow over the middle of the earth, colonizing  the smoky ruin of iron

the triumph of the machine.