Angry at the railroad cutting through his landscape, the speaker kicks a rail and accidentally summons a train. He fantasizes about tearing up the track and wrecking it, but all he can do is stand back as the engine thunders past and drowns his curses. The anger doesn’t disappear; it gets redirected. When he spots a turtle’s concealed nest and counts nine leathery eggs waiting to hatch, he turns the nest into a tiny arsenal. Addressing the distance, he warns that the next machine to pass will get “this plasm” thrown in its glass. The mood is sardonic, isolated, and defiant. A lone person with no power over industrial machinery aligns himself with buried, unborn turtles, as if their soft, hidden life is the only weapon left. It’s a strange, half-comic, half-serious rebellion—nature’s small fertility poised against the machine’s roar.
The Egg and the Machine — Summary
He gave the solid rail a hateful kick. From far away there came an answering tick And then another tick. He knew the code: His hate had roused an engine up the road. He wished when he had had the track alone He had attacked it with a club or stone And bent some rail wide open like a switch So as to wreck the engine in the ditch. Too late though, now, he had himself to thank. Its click was rising to a nearer clank. Here it came breasting like a horse in skirts. (He stood well back for fear of scalding squirts.) Then for a moment all there was was size Confusion and a roar that drowned the cries He raised against the gods in the machine. Then once again the sandbank lay serene. The traveler’s eye picked up a turtle trail, Between the dotted feet a streak of tail, And followed it to where he made out vague But certain signs of buried turtle’s egg; And probing with one finger not too rough, He found suspicious sand, and sure enough, The pocket of a little turtle mine. If there was one egg in it there were nine, Torpedo-like, with shell of gritty leather All packed in sand to wait the trump together. ‘You’d better not disturb me any more,’ He told the distance, ‘I am armed for war. The next machine that has the power to pass Will get this plasm in its goggle glass.’