STONY LIMITS
By:
June 11, 2024
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.
The poem that would praise you must be
Like the glass of some rock, sleek brown,
crowded
With dark incipient crystal growths, we see;
Or a glimpse of Petavius may have
endowed it
With the tubular and dumb-bell-shaped
inclusions surrounded
By the broad reaction rims it needs.
I have seen it in dreams and know how it
abounded
— Ah! would I could find in me like
seeds! —
As the north-easterly garden in the
lunation grows,
A spectacle not one man in ten millions
knows.
— Excerpt from “Stony Limits” — in Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934).
In the early 1930s MacDiarmid began to engage more systematically with science and, above all, with scientific languages. See Michael H. Whitworth’s “The Use of Science in MacDiarmid’s Later Poetry” from The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid.
Elsewhere in Stony Limits, we find terms such as ‘palaeocrystic’, ‘pellagra’, ‘paxwax’, ‘phosphene’, ‘photopsia’, ‘thalamus’, ‘medial nuclei’, ‘corpora geniculata’, ‘halophilous’, ‘cleistogamic’, ‘gynandromorphic’, etc.
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.