NUMBERS

By: Valery Bryusov
November 30, 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.

Not only in lives of the gods and demons, the power of a number opens itself.
— Pythagoras

By ways, prohibited for humane
     meditations,
The prophets, dreamers, sibyls and
     diviners,
Out of consciousness, oozed into
     habitation,
Where reign in glory the majestic numbers.

An intuition helps unmask enigmas,
Lights, like a scout in the jungle gutters;
And, if a hint, by chance, just easy stings us,
We are at once caught by the sacred
     shudder.

I worship and desire you, o numbers!
Like shadows, fleshless, free in every
     action,
You are a rainbow that charitably ties
The spirit’s heights with valleys of
     reflection.

— 1913. Translated by Yevgeny Bonver

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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.