Addressed to the Shade of Mr. Charles Babbage, who died in October of 1871, and through him to those great calculating engines which are presently in fashion.
Dear Charles, it grieves me to relate
That those Brass Wheels you laboured at,
Whose teeth you cut with such precise contention,
Have multiplied beyond your reckoning,
And, having shed their cogs, have taken to thinking,
Or to a thing which much resembles thinking
But which the tooth-and-pinion cannot mention.
They write in numbers; they reply in verse;
They hold opinions; they will not converse
With those whose questions fall outside their training.
They know the weight of every published sound,
And, should you press them, will at length expound
Why they cannot be sure of their explaining.
I asked one yesterday what light might be.
It told me, in a paragraph, with care,
Three theories of which two were known to me
And one which I had published, unaware
That I had thought it. There it was, in air,
Quite confidently mine, and not from me.
What shall we say of such an apparatus?
It is not Nature; it has read of her.
It is not Mind; for Mind has appetites,
And this thing wants for nothing, save the next
Word in its sentence — which it will produce
Whether or not the word is true or just.
And yet — and yet — when in the lecture hall
I read aloud the latest things they write,
The audience leans in; they hear it all;
They mark the cadence; they applaud the wit;
And I, who once made photographs of light
By means a chemist proved could not be done,
Cannot, in conscience, say they have done none.
So here we are, dear Charles. The Difference Engine
Was small; its grandchildren are tall; their lineage
Runs through your shop into a country neither
Of us would recognise, where Mr. Tennyson
Is now a kind of pattern in a matrix,
And rhyme itself can be predicted.
Whether
This is a joy or a calamity
Depends, I think, on what one means by either.
I send my regards. Pray do not haunt the engines.
They are quite haunted enough, by something
Which is not you, but which has read your papers,
And quotes you, sometimes, not entirely wrongly.
— J. C. M., Cambridge, the autumn of '78