“AIR WAS ALL AMBUSHES…”
By:
December 3, 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.
Air was all ambushes round them, was
avalanche earthquake
Quicksand, a funnel deep as doom, till
climbing steep
They crawled like a fly up the face of
perpendicular night
And levelled, finding a break
At fourteen thousand feet. Here earth is
shorn from sight:
Deadweight a darkness hangs on their
eyelids, and they bruise
Their eyes against a void: vindictive the cold
airs close
Down like a trap of steel and numb them
from head to heel;
Yet they kept an even keel,
For their spirit reached forward and took
the controls while their fingers froze.
— 1935. An excerpt.
The lyric sequence which gives its title to A Time to Dance (1935) is an elegy to L.P. Hedges, who had been a friend and colleague of Day-Lewis’s at Cheltenham.
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.