“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”

“I like to think” is how Richard Brautigan begins his poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, which immediately introduces the notion of wishful thinking. Whatever Brautigan would like to think, it is not the truth, otherwise he would be writing a more confident statement, such as, “I think”. From this opening statement, Brautigan’s poem takes on a more anti-technology position than what is inferred from the poem’s comforting title.

The first two stanzas are devoted to the union of nature and technology, two drastically different concepts. Brautigan creates a world where “deer stroll peacefully / past computers” and there is a “cybernetic forest / filled with pines and electronics”. This imagery shows the wish for a balance between technology and nature, as if the two could live without distinction. However, Brautigan adds lines such as “right now please!” and “it has to be!” contained within parentheses and followed by exclamation points, that emphasize how far-fetched the idea of a world where nature and machines co-exist is. These comments imply that Brautigan is looking for reassurance that he has nothing to fear, when his faith in technology would be undisputable if it were true.

In the third stanza, Brautigan’s side comments appear more as denials as they grow more desperate. Also, in this last stanza, Brautigan is no longer creating a balance between nature and technology, but a desire for the human race to completely turn away from society and be “joined back to nature”. This would mean moving backwards, away from technology and civilization, and back to the wild. This can be interpreted as an escape, and a way to avoid the advance of the machines that are still watching over. There is negative connotation with the words “watched over”, as if the human race is being monitored by the machines, or analyzed from a distance.

Yet the style in which Brautigan presents his idealistic world leads to the idea that this could be an attainable future. Words such as “harmony”, “mutually”, “pure” and “free” suggest an utopia in which man-kind is no longer obligated to work because technology has solved all problems. Brautigan describes nature as being untainted by the addition of technology, to the point where people would be encouraged toward the use of machines.

However, I believe Brautigan intended his poem to be anti-technology. There are arguments against this, but nothing as strong as the side comments slipped into the poem between parentheses. To me, those conveyed the most doubt for a world living along-side technology, and expressed an almost dire warning for a dependency on machines.