AN ECLOGUE FOR CHRISTMAS
By:
December 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.
“In the country they are still hunting…”
B. In the country they are still hunting, in
the heavy shires
Greyness is on the fields and sunset like a
line of pyres
Of barbarous heroes smoulders through
the ancient air
Hazed with factory dust and, orange
opposite, the moon’s glare,
Goggling yokel-stubborn through the iron
trees,
Jeers at the end of us, our bland ancestral
ease;
We shall go down like palaeolithic man
Before some new Ice Age or Genghiz Khan.
“What will happen to us when…”
B. What will happen to us when the State
takes down the manor wall
When there is no more private shooting or
fishing, when the trees are all cut down
When faces are all dials and cannot smile
or frown —
A. What will happen when the sniggering
machine-guns in the hands of the young
men
Are trained on every flat and club and
beauty parlour and Father’s den?
What will happen when our civilization like
a long pent balloon —
B. What will happen will happen; the whore
and the buffoon
Will come off best; no dreamers, they
cannot lose their dream
And are at least likely to be reinstated in
the new régime.
— A couple of excerpts from “An Eclogue for Christmas,” which first appeared in the The American Review (May 1934). MacNeice’s version of “The Decline of the West” owes something both to Eliot and to Marx — a hybridization common in the early 1930s.
It’s a hilariously dyspeptic poem, its couplets endlessly quotable.
“There are in the country also of who I am afraid — / Men who put beer into a belly that is dead…”
“And not till the Goths again come swarming down the hill / Will cease the clangour of the pneumatic drill.”
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.