“ALL IS SOLD, ALL IS LOST”
By:
November 9, 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.
All is sold, all is lost, all is plundered,
Death’s wing has flashed black on our sight,
All’s gnawed bare with sore want and sick
longing,—
Then how are we graced with this light?
By day the town breathes a deep fragrance
Of cherry from woods none descries;
By night new and strange constellations
Shine forth in the pale summer skies.
And these houses, this dirt, these mean
ruins,
Are touched by the miracle, too;
It is close: the desired, despaired of,
That all longed for, but none ever knew.
— Anna Akhmatova is considered of the greatest women poets in the history of Russian poetry. The English-language translation of this 1921 poem was sourced from Russian Poetry: An Anthology (1927), chosen and translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky.
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.