INVITATION TO JUNO
By:
July 25, 2024
A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.
Lucretius could not credit centaurs;
Such bicycle he deemed asynchronous.
‘Man superannuates the horse;
Horse pulses will not gear with ours.’
Johnson could see no bicycle would go;
‘You bear yourself and the machine as well.’
Genets for germans sprang not from
Othello,
Ixion rides upon a single wheel.
Courage. Weren’t strips of heart culture
seen
Of late mating two periodicities?
Did not once the adroit Darwin
Graft annual upon perennial trees?
— First published in Cambridge Review in May 1928; reprinted in the collection New Signatures (1932).
Refers to the myth of Ixion, a mortal king who attempted to have an affair with Juno (Hera), wife of Jupiter (Zeus), but was foiled by her husband who sent a cloud in place of his wife. Ixion’s union with the cloud-simulacrum of Juno led to the creation (eventually) of the race of centaurs, whose nature conjoins two cycles (life-periods) — ‘such bicycle,’ as Empson puts it. As punishment for trying to father a demigod, a ‘two-wheeler,’ Jupiter fastened Ixion to a single burning wheel.
Lucretius dismisses the possible existence of centaurs, or of any other “creatures with a double nature.”
The Johnson quote, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, is not so much about a bicycle as a hand-cranked vehicle. Johnson’s disparaging point is that instead of making locomotion easier, this device makes it more difficult — because in addition to moving yourself, now your efforts have to move the machine too.
The poet is an Ixion, and his mistress, a Juno — so Empson explains. The poet is inviting his mistress to another trial following Darwin’s experiment in botany — i.e., hybrids are more of a possibility now. He invites his mistress to have the courage to be seduced again.
The periodical printing of this love poem contained two additional stanzas which can be found in the notes to Empson’s collected poems.
Iago threatened Brabantio about gannets (small Spanish horses), saying that he’d end up having horses for relatives… again, a human-horse reference.
Re the heart culture. Empson was interested in reports of tiny pieces of tissue from a heart being grown separately, then joined together. As the embryonic heart develops (whether in utero, or in vitro), the individual cardiac muscles beat with their own individual rates; but as the cells grow to touch one another, gap junctions are formed and the cells become organized into a network; they then adopt a common rate.
Darwin mentions, in The Origin of Species, the grafting of annual upon perennial trees — again the motif of two unlike species forming a unity.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.