Art & Creativity Quote by Lucy Larcom

A factory floor is a cruel place to talk about freedom, which is exactly why Larcom’s line lands with such quiet force. She’s not just personifying “machinery” as an oppressor; she’s naming an early industrial truth: the new economy didn’t only want your labor, it wanted your inner life. “Slave” is a charged word in the 19th-century American ear, collapsing wage work and moral captivity into one indictment. It’s an argument that the danger of mechanization isn’t noise or fatigue, but the way repetition can colonize attention until the self becomes an extension of the loom.

The sentence’s power comes from its acoustics. “Incessant discords” evokes the literal clatter of mills, yet Larcom turns sound into ideology: discord as a constant pressure to think smaller, flatter, more compliant. Against it she offers “music,” not as escapism but as discipline. “If I would let them fly high enough” makes the victory conditional and personal, a bracing admission that resistance is partly an interior choice. She’s not romanticizing hardship; she’s describing a tactic for survival when structural power can’t be confronted head-on.

Context matters: Larcom worked in Lowell textile mills as a child and later became one of their best-known poet-witnesses. This is working-class transcendentalism with grit under its fingernails. The subtext is radical but not utopian: you may not control the machine, but you can refuse its final demand - that you stop hearing yourself.