RADIUM
By:
March 29, 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.
Radium, thou fateful youngling,
hieroglyphed,
And knowing not the goal,
But giving, giving, eager with the gift,
Exhaustless as the soul! —
Pillars are crumbling, chronicles have
stopped,
Beauty itself sublime
Has perished, thrones have paled, and
nations dropped,
Weary of place and time.
Steadfast, afar from mortal loves and
hates,
Pre-dating creed and church,
Stands Truth, the secret marble that awaits
The chiselling hand, Research.
— I encountered this poem in Poems for a Machine Age (1941, selected and edited by Horace J. McNeil of Brooklyn Technical High School). Oddly, only the first stanza was reproduced there, though it wasn’t labeled an excerpt. Also, the poem was somewhat altered. The version here appeared in The Poetry Journal vol. 3 (1914–15).
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.