Explore the poem

‘Machines’ presents an elaborate and ingenious comparison between a piece of slow, stately Purcell music played on the harpsichord and a twelve-speed racing bike. This kind of extended, skilfully sustained comparison, sometimes known as a ‘conceit’,was made popular by the likes of John Donne, writing in the seventeenth century. Donaghy, writing in the late twentieth century, was an admirer of Donne and his fellow Metaphysical poets.

Note the fusion of intellect and emotion in the poem. It begins with an address to a loved one, ‘Dearest’, but immediately moves in to the conceit. Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe and the bicycle engineer Schwinn are mentioned in the same line as the poem explores ‘The machinery of grace’.

Line ten, with its reference to ‘this talk’ suggests a more direct appeal to his ‘Dearest’. What might the poet be hoping for if the ‘effortless gadgetry of love’ works as smoothly and successfully as a beautiful piece of music or a precisely engineered bicycle wheel?

The themes of movement and progression are captured in the final line, which is, like the whole poem, carefully balanced. The lovers, cyclists and harpsichordists all know that they ‘only by moving can balance, Only by balancing move.’

About Michael Donaghy

Michael Donaghy was born and educated in America but moved to London in his early thirties. He grew up in the Bronx in New York in an area of racial tension and violence, but became an enthusiastic reader of poetry in public libraries. He even continued to read while working as a doorman, keeping copies of poems under his hat.

In England he taught at City University and Birkbeck College in London and was a critic and poetry editor. Donaghy was also an accomplished musician, specializing in traditional Irish music.

His first full-length collection of poetry, Shibboleth, won literary prizes, as did subsequent collections, and he was greatly admired as a performer of his own work, which he always recited from memory.

Donaghy’s work can be both playful and melancholic, streetwise and exceptionally learned. His collected poems were published posthumously in 2009 after his sudden death in 2004.