George Heath page 6c
But Heath was also aware of the vast difference in the industrial landscape in other parts of northern Staffordshire. In one of his poems The Man o' Mow (Mow Cop), he refers to the throbbing of "a monster Industry". The following extract from A Staffordshire Idyll takes the description further:
His heart was down a dreaming, but his eyes
Were out at window on the darkling waste
Among tall chimneys, propping up the clouds,
Black engine-piles; gaunt shaft-frames; coils
Of wires and ropes; corves; pullies; tramway-breaks;
Vast shard and cinder-rucks, and stunted trees
The white light faded while the thickening sleet
Came reeling down, and belch'd the black smoke out
In widening columns, while the signal lights
And pit-fires flamed in awful dance, and came
The distant gleam of furnace vomitings
And all the night was eerie with wild sounds
The shriek and hiss of steam, the wizz and whir
Of ponderous wheels; the shout and tramp of men;
The clank and grate of huge machinery
And o'er the hills the far forge-hammer's thud
Came like the throbbing of the world's great pulse.
© Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Archive Service, 2010
Staffordshire Record Office, 6857/2/1
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