TRIAD

By: Robinson Jeffers
October 29, 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.

Science, that makes wheels turn, cities
     grow,
Moribund people live on, playthings
     increase,
But has fallen from hope to confusion at
     her own business
Of understanding the nature of things; new
     Russia,
That stood a moment at dreadful cost half
     free,
Beholding the open, all the glades of the
     world
On both sides of the trap, and resolutely
Walked into the trap that has Europe and
     America;
The poet, who wishes not to play games
     with words,
His affair being to awake dangerous images
And call the hawks; they all feed the future,
     they serve God,
Who is very beautiful, but hardly a friend of
     humanity.

— from Give Your Heart to the Hawks (1931–1933)

Jeffers here suggests that science has lost its purpose, communism (post-October Revolution) has fallen into a trap, and poetry has become mere entertainment.

In a 1966 Virginia Quarterly Review essay, William H. Nolte writes: “In ‘Triad’ Jeffers commented on the ‘affair’ of the poet while at the same time criticizing Science, about which he probably knew more than any other poet in history, and Russia — the two modern “experiments” in which man placed so much hope.”

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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.