Explore "Song of the Rail" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Oh, an ugly thing is an iron rail, / Black, with its face to the dust. / But it carries a message where winged things fail; / It crosses the mountains, and catches the trail, / While the winds and the sea make sport of a sail; / Oh, a rail is a friend to trust.
The iron rail, with its face to the sod, / Is only a bar of ore; / Yet it speeds where never a foot has trod; / And the narrow path where it leads, grows broad; / And it speaks to the world in the voice of God, / That echoes from shore to shore.
Though the iron rail, on the earth down flung, / Seems kin to the loam and the soil, / Wherever its high shrill note is sung, / Out of the jungle fair homes have sprung, / And the voices of babel find one tongue, / In the common language of toil.
Of priest, and warrior, and conquering king, / Of Knights of the Holy Grail, / Of wonders of winter, and glories of spring, / Always and ever the poets sing; / But the great God-Force, in a lowly thing, / I sing, in my song of the rail.