SIGNATURE FOR TEMPO

By: Archibald MacLeish
November 3, 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.

Liubov Popova’s “Composition with Figures” (1913)

I

Think that this world against the wind of
     time
Perpetually falls the way a hawk
Falls at the wind’s edge but is motionless—

Think that this silver snail the moon will
     climb
All night upon time’s curving stalk
That as she climbs bends, bends beneath
     her—
Yes
And think that we remember the past time.

II

These live people,
These more
Than three dimensional
By time protracted edgewise into
     heretofore
People,
How shall we bury all
These queer-shaped people,
In graves that have no more
Than three dimensions?
Can we dig
With such sidlings and declensions
As to coffin bodies big
With memory?
And how
Can the earth’s contracted Now
Enclose these knuckles and this crooked
     knee
Sprawled over hours of a sun long set?
Or do these bones forget?

III

The body of one borne
Landward on relinquishing seas,
Worn
By the sliding of water

Whom time goes over wave by wave, do I
     lie
Drowned in a crumble of surf at the sea’s
     edge?—

And wonder now what ancient bones are
     these
That flake on sifting flake
Out of deep time have shelved this shallow
     ledge
Where the waves break—

— from Streets in the Moon (1926). An imaginative treatment of time as fourth dimension.

***

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.

Categories

Poetry, Radium Age SF