Then open the valves—­
Drive the fires high,
Your blossoms nurturing. 
(Day is at the gates
And a young wind...)

Put by your rod, comrade,
And look with me, shading your eyes... 
Do you not see—­
Through the lucent haze
Out of the converter rising—­
In the spirals of fire
Smiting and blinding,
A shadowy shape
White as a flame of sacrifice,
Like a lily swaying?

III

The ore leaping in the crucibles,
The ore communicant,
Sending faint thrills along the leads... 
Fire is running along the roots of the mountains... 
I feel the long recoil of earth
As under a mighty quickening... 
(Dawn is aglow in the light of the Iron...)
All palpitant, I wait...

IV

Here ye, Dictators—­late Lords of the Iron,
Shut in your council rooms, palsied, depowered—­
The blooded, implacable Word? 
Not whispered in cloture, one to the other,
(Brother in fear of the fear of his brother...)
But chanted and thundered
On the brazen, articulate tongues of the Iron
Babbling in flame...

Sung to the rhythm of prisons dismantled,
Manacles riven and ramparts defaced... 
(Hearts death-anointed yet hearing life calling...)
Ankle chains bursting and gallows unbraced...

Sung to the rhythm of arsenals burning... 
Clangor of iron smashing on iron,
Turmoil of metal and dissonant baying
Of mail-sided monsters shattered asunder...

Hulks of black turbines all mangled and roaring,
Battering egress through ramparted walls... 
Mouthing of engines, made rabid with power,
Into the holocaust snorting and plunging...

Mighty converters torn from their axis,
Flung to the furnaces, vomiting fire,
Jumbled in white-heaten masses disshapen... 
Writhing in flame-tortured levers of iron...

Gnashing of steel serpents twisting and dying... 
Screeching of steam-glutted cauldrons rending... 
Shock of leviathans prone on each other... 
Scaled flanks touching, ore entering ore... 
Steel haunches closing and grappling and swaying
In the waltz of the mating locked mammoths of iron,
Tasting the turbulent fury of living,
Mad with a moment’s exuberant living! 
Crash of devastating hammers despoiling.. 
Hands inexorable, marring
What hands had so cunningly moulded...

Structures of steel welded, subtily tempered,
Marvelous wrought of the wizards of ore,
Torn into octaves discordantly clashing,
Chords never final but onward progressing
In monstrous fusion of sound ever smiting on sound
     in mad vortices whirling...

Till the ear, tortured, shrieks for cessation
Of the raving inharmonies hatefully mingling... 
The fierce obligato the steel pipes are screaming... 
The blare of the rude molten music of Iron...