What is Stephen Vincent Benet's "Nightmare Number Three" about and what is the message?

Question

For example, what does the speaker envision will happen with machines and humans in the future?

Answer 1

A poet, Stephen Vincent Benet, saw it coming. The revolt of the machines. Nightmare Number Three, he called his poem.

"I kind of wonder myself when they started thinking," he says of the machines. "They must have planned it for years. . . . I guess they got tired of us and the whole smell of human hands."

Whatever. Telephone cords strangle Art Zuckow. A motorized scaffold consumes the window-washer.

"I wish I hadn't looked into the beauty parlor," our poet says, "and seen what was happening there. But those are female machines and a bit high-strung."

It could all settle down, the poet supposes, and a truce prevail . . . "except for one small detail that bothers me and that's the food proposition.

"Because, you see, the concrete-mixer may have made a mistake, and it looks like just high spirits.

"But, if it's got so they like the flavor . . . well . . . "

And, see, here's the scary part. Computers weren't even invented when that cement mixer had its little lunch.

Now we have them.

Everywhere.

Mocking us.

Eating up our lives.