I like to see it lap the Miles

"I like to see it lap the Miles" is a short poem by Emily Dickinson describing an "iron horse" or railroad engine and its train.

This poem is four stanzas, each with a length of four lines, and describes a railroad engine and its train of cars in metaphors that suggest an animal that is both "docile" and "omnipotent".

It passes mountains with a "prodigious step", "peers" superciliously into shanties, and moves through a narrow passage in a quarry.

The exact animal employed as a metaphor for the railroad initially proves a puzzle, but at poem's end it is decidedly a horse which neighs and stops (like the Christmas Star) at a "stable door".

The "horrid - hooting stanza" is the train's whistle but, at the same time, as Vendler believes, a self-criticism Dickinson makes of herself as a "bad poet".