OUR MARCH
By:
April 8, 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.
Beat the squares with the tramp of rebels!
Higher, ranges of haughty heads!
We’ll wash the world with a second deluge,
Now’s the hour whose coming it dreads.
Too slow, the wagon of years,
The oxen of days — too glum.
Our god is the god of speed,
Our heart — our battle-drum.
Is there gold diviner than ours?
What wasp of a bullet us can sting?
Songs are our weapons, our power of
powers,
Our gold — our voices; just hear us sing!
Meadow, lie green on the earth!
With silk our days for us line!
Rainbow, give colour and girth
To the fleet-foot steeds of time.
The heavens grudge us their starry
glamour.
Bah! Without it our songs can thrive.
Hey there, Ursus Major, clamour
For us to be taken to heaven alive!
Sing, of delight drink deep,
Drain spring by cups, not by thimbles.
Heart, step up your beat!
Our breasts be the brass of cymbals!
— 1918. Translated by Dorian Rottenberg.
Mayakovsky co-founded the Futurist movement, whose early collection was called, significantly, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912). Gorky remarked that while Futurism perhaps did not exist, a great poet did: Mayakovsky.
Mayakovsky’s 1929 play The Bedbug is a work of Radium Age proto-sf.
His despondency in personal affairs as much as his disillusionment with politics led him to shoot himself. Because he was both revered and reviled, his death held profound though various meaning for everyone. Tens of thousands of people attended his funeral. Mayakovsky was canonized by Stalin, who said about him: “Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our time. Indifference to his poetry is a crime.” This eulogy was, in Pasternak’s view, Mayakovsky’s second death.
Notes from Russian Poetry: An Anthology, chosen and translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky (1927). The translation here, though, is not the translation from that book.
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.