THE HUMAN BEING
By:
April 15, 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.
In the hot red-summer, over the
dust-frothing rotation of the rolling
earth, among farmers stooped low and
soldiers dulled, amidst the clattering
hustle of round cities
The human being leapt into the air.
Oh hovering pillar, bright pillars of legs and
arms, sturdy radiant pillar of the body,
shining sphere of the head!
He hovered in silence, his breath irradiated
the sprouting earth.
The sun moved in and out of his round eye.
He shut his curved eyelids, the moon
moved up and down. The gentle waving
motion of his hands flung the orbit of
the stars like the flashing thong of a
whip.
The din flowed around the small earth as
quietly as the moisture on a cluster of
violets under a glass dome.
The foolish earth trembled in its blind
course.
The human being smiled across the world
like fiery glass caverns,
The heavens shot through him, human
being, flaringly translucent, in a comet’s
tail!
Thinking, glowing spheres, boiled up and
down in him.
Thinking flowed about him in a burning
froth,
Blazing thinking darted through him,
Shimmering pulse of the heavens, human
being!
Oh blood of God, flaming turbulent giant
sea in the bright crystal.
Human being, shiny tube: globes, burning
giant eyes float through him like small
glowing mirrors,
Human being, his orifices are slurping
mouths, he swallows and spouts the
blue pounding waves of the torrid
heavens.
The human being lies on the radiant floor
of the heavens,
His breath gently nudges the earth like a
small glass ball on the shimmering
fountain.
Oh white-shining pillars, through which
thinking courses up and down through
the sparkling of the blood.
He lifts the gleaming pillars of the body: he
casts about himself the wild whirling of
round horizons as bright as the
circles of snowflakes!
Flashing triangles shoot out of his head and
surround the heavenly stars,
He hurls the mighty intertwined divine
curves about in the world, they return to
him as the boomerang returns to the
dark warrior who flings it.
The human being hovers within a luminous
net in flight flaring up and dying down
like a pulse beat,
He extinguishes and ignites when thinking
courses through him,
On his radiant body he rocks the waving
motion that returns.
He turns his flaming head and paints about
himself on black night the dispatched
lines of light in their sinking glow:
Spheres hazily bright burst open and curve
like flower petals, jagged planes in
fire-light ball themselves shimmeringly
into oblique cones, pointed pyramid
pinnacles rise from yellow sparks like
sunlights.
In radiant glory the human being lifts from
the night his torch-limbs and pours his
hands out white over the earth,
The bright numerals, oh sparkling strips
like smelted metal.
But when it streams across the hot earth
(which arches like a rearing animal),
Does it not later whirl back? whirl up thin
and scattered, weighed down with
earth-space:
Bleating of animals. Fragrance of the green
trees, multi-colored dancing of pollen,
colors of the sun in the rain. Long tones
of music.
— Appears in the 1919 expressionist anthology Menschheitsdämmerung. Translation from the 1994 edition. Not sure when it was first published.
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.