“EARTH ALREADY TO ITS DOOM…”
By:
January 26, 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.
“For whether earth already to its doom
Reels orbit-slipped, or whether decades
hence,
Or next year, or to-morrow, or to-day
The weight of ice amassed at either pole
Shall change our axis till a deluge wipe
The citied world away, and glacial drift
Plough up the earth and harrow it again;
Or whether flame consume us
comet-struck;
Or the earth’s crust fall in; or to the sun
Returning whence it sprang, our orb effete,
Enwombed in pristine fire once more,
become
The brilliant seed of stars to be, we know
That men shall cease: their speech, their
deeds, their arts,
The wonder of their being, passion, love,
Ambition, charity, transcendent thought
Shall leave no memory, token, sign, or sigh
In any speck of dust, or nook of space;
We know that here and now is
Heaven-and-Hell;
This is the Promised Land, the Golden Age,
This, the Millennium, and the Aftertime,
The fixed, eternal moment, sounding on.”
— An excerpt from The Testament of a Prime Minister (1904), which offers an inferno-like vision of East London.
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.