1970: A Vision of the Coming Age — Text and Context

Telegraph as Oracle and Organizing Device

The poem’s opening relies on the telegraph to establish both its setting and its method. The speaker, reclining near “the tall posts of the telegraph thought-road,” claims to hear every word transmitted: “the short business message—the tale of some wrong, / An accident, not on the Jersey railway, / The prices of stocks—events of the day.” This conceit allows Collins to introduce a rapid succession of voices and locations—a merchant in Japan, a lady in Boston ordering fruit from Cuba, a wedding invitation, a summons to a dying friend. The telegraph becomes a kind of oracle, delivering news from afar and collapsing distance. The repeated line “It was ‘nineteen hundred and threescore and ten’” anchors these fragments in a specific future year. The poem thus uses the telegraph not merely as a prop but as a structural principle, generating a mosaic of vignettes that together build the utopian world.

A Harmless Catastrophe and the Logic of Improvement

One of the most striking episodes in the excerpts is the description of a train explosion on the Omaha plain. The engine “blew up” and “to atoms it flew, but no one was hurt, / Only some of the passengers covered with dirt.” The fireman is found “half a mile from the spot, / Safely lodged in a village,” and the engineer’s body is buried in sand except for “a part of one hand.” Yet the only damage is “a scratch on each face.” This incident exemplifies the poem’s logic: technology in the future is powerful but entirely benign. The explosion is spectacular yet harmless, a marvel of safety rather than a disaster. Collins extends this pattern to other domains: mines have fire-damp but “the light they now used created no heat,” and “the air, so mephitic of old time, became / As oxygen pure.” The poem consistently presents progress as the elimination of risk and suffering, not the absence of machinery.

A Landscape Without Predation or Poverty

As the speaker travels through the transformed countryside, the poem catalogues a world where natural and social ills have vanished. “The fox and the hare lived in the same den / On intimate terms, unmolested by men,” and “every beast, bird or fish” no longer regards each other as prey. Human institutions of charity have become obsolete: “I looked for the buildings benevolence reared— / There were none, for the paupers had all disappeared.” The blind, sick, deaf, lame, and “feeble of mind” are absent. Workshops are airy and sunlit, and the master works alongside his employees, guided by the golden rule. The landscape itself is fruitful: “the bright golden orange gleamed through the dark leaves,” and the vine and fig flourish. Collins imagines a world where Christian love has reordered both society and nature, producing a peace that extends from human relations to the animal kingdom.

Readers should note that the poem’s vision is presented as a single, uninterrupted dream, and the excerpts cover only the first half of the work. The speaker’s journey continues beyond the passages provided, and the full poem may develop or complicate the utopian picture. Collins’s reliance on the telegraph as a framing device and his repeated use of the date 1970 give the poem a rhythmic, almost incantatory quality. The work rewards attention to its small, concrete details—the scratch on the engineer’s face, the barrel of oranges, the fox and hare sharing a den—which ground the abstract ideal in specific, sometimes whimsical images.

There’s something tender about Collins’s belief that by 1970 we’d have outgrown harm, and I catch that same wistfulness in the Rubáiyát of Doc Sifers — Key Ideas to Explore, where the old certainties feel more like questions. Maybe every era needs its gentle reimagining of what peace could look like, even if only in the margins.