Elon Musk is invoking the spirit of a dead poet to help him bore.
Musk has been developing machines to dig a network of tunnels he’s promised, in order to connect cities like New York and Washington, D.C. with a hyperloop train. On Oct. 18, the entrepreneur tweeted that another of his Boring Company machines is almost ready, and that it’s called “Line-Storm,” named after an early 20th-century poem by Robert Frost.
“A Line-Storm Song” is one of Frost’s earliest poems, published in his first book of poetry, A Boy’s Will (1913). The lyric poem is told from the point of view of a young man coming of age, appealing to his lover to join him as a rainstorm rages. The storm brings despair to the poem’s woods, stops birds from singing, and flowers and bees from meeting.
The Boring Company declined to comment on the connection between the dripping-wet lover and Musk’s digging machine. Does he mean to say that the boring machine is itself a storm coming to wreak havoc on the natural world? Or maybe that he’s the boy in a downpour, holding his hands out for anyone who wants to believe in him?
The name follows Musk’s theme of literary names for his machines. The first, announced in May, is called Godot, from Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, an ironic choice given that the entire piece unfolds without Godot ever showing up.