Radar

Kolster and Dunmore made a remarkable valve

Which would bind forever the sense of the plunging wave;

Riddling the grid they gazed at a colander

Bending like a bough to and fro in the created heat.

Never was a glass cage seen like theirs;

The throttled note pushing unasked into the ear

Cancelled humanity, forced the hand to move,

Crammed quivering gauges with eyes that never closed.

Meanwhile the radiation sprang from the tentative rod,

Adored by the hymn of the mains singing like ladies

Countries away from the white laboratory’s quiet,

Sped by the sea to the sky’s alphabetical layers.

Like a sunbeam the wave-train smote the metal mirror.

The wing of the monoplane at its English ceiling,

And with deathless energy stooped at its home and maker;

A sign fallen from heaven for the waiting guns.

And so the screaming electrode in Kolster’s house

Was in labour, you see, with the crude mechanical wind

That blew through Dunmore, making of the innocent scientist

A living directing-horn for the ears of war.

On the enemy side stood aerials like the bereaved

Who mask their essence with respectable sound;

And Kolster and Dunmore heard their interference,

But it was dismissed for them as a stray effect.