From: LouisFors <LouisFors@aol.com>
Message-ID: <7c3b9bae.3543c54c@aol.com>
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 1998 19:37:47 EDT
To: emweb@fmgmt.mgmt.utoronto.ca
Mime-Version: 1.0
Subject: 414 = coming of the industrial age
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-emweb@mgmt.utoronto.ca
Precedence: list
Reply-To: emweb@mgmt.utoronto.ca
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

Friends:

I wrote at the end of an earlier rambling discourse on # 414:

> ED was predicting the industrial age,  which wasn't quite in America yet--a 
> boiling wheel, gauges, and, in general a feeling of being caught up in 
> something that would lessen the role of the single individual, all very
scary 
> stuff.  For some reason, perhaps quite idiosyncratic, I am reminded of the 
> ending of Benet's John Brown's Body which speaks of the coming of the 
> industrial age.

Alas, the thought above remains with me.  I would guess that a reading of 414
as dealing with the industrial age has been made by a Dickinson scholar,
but...

maelstrom with a notch = cog
narrowing its boiling wheel = steam
goblin with a gauge = new measurement technologies 
not a sinew - stirred - could help = human muscles reduced to effectiveness
dungeon's luxury of doubt = trapped while waiting to discover what the future
of        
     technology
to gibbets (gallows) = the end is near; technology will win
to perish, or to live? = well, we can't yet tell, technology may or may not
win
goblins, fiends, and creatures = scary stuff about technology

Regard the = sign as a simple way of exploring, not as a simplistic
conclusion.

I've just poked around the archive of postings and discovered that the server
has apparently been down for the day, perhaps longer.  I have taken that as a
sign of mechanical problems, not as an effort to block my rantings. I also
found a post noting that Cynthia Wolff, in her biography of ED, which I
haven't read, apparently found watch mechanism somewhere in 414.

>From a rainy Santa Fe, 

Louis Forsdale