THE STATISTICIAN
By:
January 7, 2025
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.
He gathers data:
The mathematics of a comet’s curve
Or when the oriole nests,
The tensile strength of steel
Or the decline of cholera in the Philippines.
He does not formulate laws
Or institute practical measures
Or touch the kindling spark of imagination
To facts observed; He counts and sifts and classifies.
He is no architect, inventor, poet;
Yet on his faithfulness we build:
A plumb line wrong,
And all the bricks are tumbling round our heads.
He bent the timbers of Columbus’ galleon
And squared the stones of Chartres,
He pounded Titian’s colors
And chronicled events that Shakespeare sang.
A slave, some call him.
But is he not —
This man who dares not lose himself in beauty
For fear he miss a fact —
The proofreader of God?
— I encountered this poem in Poems for a Machine Age (1941, selected and edited by Horace J. McNeil of Brooklyn Technical High School). Earlier, it was published in The Forum (1923).
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.