TRANSITIONAL POEM
By:
September 4, 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.
Come up, Methuselah,
You doddering superman!
Give me an instant realized
And I’ll outdo your span.
In that one moment of evening
When roses are most red
can fold back the firmament,
I can put time to bed.
Abraham, stint your tally
Of concubines and cattle!
Give place to me — capitalist
In more intrinsic metal.
I have a lover of flesh
And a lover that is a sprite:
To-day I lie down with finite,
To-morrow with infinite.
That one is a constant
And suffers no eclipse,
Though I feel sun and moon burning
Together on her lips.
This one is a constant,
But she’s not kind at all;
She raddles her gown with my despairs
And paints her lip with gall.
My lover of flesh is wild,
And willing to kiss again;
She is the potency of earth
When woods exhale the rain.
My lover of air, like Artemis
Spectrally embraced,
Shuns the daylight that twists her smile
To mineral distaste.
Twin poles energic, they
Stand fast and generate
This spark that crackles in the void
As between fate and fate.
— Section 4 of Transitional Poem (1929). Most of this volume (published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press) was written during the winter of 1927-1928. When first published, it was accompanied by notes in the manner of T.S. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land. The unity of the whole and of each part is thematic rather than narrative, In his notes, Day-Lewis identifies the theme as the pursuit of wholeness. (See this Poetry Foundation page.)
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.