“The Iron Merrimac” is a rarely reprinted poem by the American jurist Billings Learned Hand, written in 1918 during the final year of the First World War. The poem invokes the image of the Civil War ironclad Merrimack as a symbol of mechanized resolve and national endurance, rendered in an austere, unornamented diction that echoes Hand’s own legal prose. Though primarily known for his jurisprudence, Hand’s choice to publish a poem at this historical moment reveals something of the inner life of a man more commonly associated with legal restraint than poetic expression.
Hand was born in 1872 in Albany, New York, to a family steeped in the legal profession. His father, Samuel Hand, served briefly on the New York Court of Appeals before his untimely death, leaving the younger Hand to be raised by his mother, Lydia, a woman of formidable will. Educated at Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Hand was deeply influenced by the constitutional theorist James Bradley Thayer and became an early advocate for judicial modesty—a belief that the law must remain anchored in institutional humility rather than moral certainty.
Appointed to the U.S. District Court by President Taft in 1909, Hand later joined the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where he developed a reputation for finely wrought legal opinions marked by intellectual clarity and measured skepticism. His writings on free speech, administrative law, and statutory interpretation remain central to American legal thought, and he is often regarded as the most important judge never to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Yet Hand’s private pursuits revealed dimensions of his personality not easily squared with his public role. He was, for instance, an enthusiastic amateur experimental musician, having designed a series of electroacoustic instruments between 1915 and 1922 in collaboration with regional machinists, engineers and organ builders.
Chief among these devices were the Oscillaphone, the Bellharmonic Cabinet, and a bass-register apparatus known simply as the Subsonique—a large, boxy unit constructed of walnut and copper, capable of emitting dense low-frequency waves via coiled filament transducers.
These devices were not curiosities for private amusement. In a handful of closed performances—typically in university basements or civic lecture halls—they were used in concert with percussion ensembles.
The piece included here, whose relationship to “The Iron Merrimac” remains speculative, was scored for three percussionists and three electroacoustic operators. The rhythms, though devised without reference to contemporary idioms, bear an uncanny resemblance to certain late-20th-century forms of electronically mediated music: dense, syncopated, and driven by irregular bursts of low-frequency energy.
Hand never published these compositions, and seems not to have considered them “music” in any formal sense, referring instead to “tonal essays.” He remained circumspect about his musical experiments, though he maintained a brief but intense correspondence with Edgard Varèse, with whom he shared an interest in sonic architecture and the physics of resonance. It was Varèse who first referred to Hand’s Subsonique as “a kind of tectonic tuba.”
Outside of law and music, Hand was an avid skydiver in his early fifties—an unusual pursuit for a man of his profession and era—and an obsessive collector and amateur metallurgist of historical cutlery. These diversions, idiosyncratic as they may seem, offer glimpses into the precision and curiosity that defined his broader intellectual life.
That he turned, briefly and seriously, to poetry during wartime is not aberrant but entirely consistent. “The Iron Merrimac” is less a flight of sentiment than an exercise in structural and moral inquiry. Its martial metaphors are grounded in historical materialism; its cadence mirrors that of marching columns and bureaucratic prose. It is a legal mind dreaming in verse—disciplined, anxious, and acutely aware of the machinery of the state, both literal and figurative.
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