“MATTER INCANDESCENT”
By:
October 25, 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.
[…]
Yet, yet I know that everywhere is Matter.
Dreams of the dreams of Matter, Heaven
and Hell
In massed imaginings arose and flowered
From world-old memories glimmering
darkly still
Through brain and bone of phosphorus
knit, occult
In carbon, calcium, metals, vapours, earths
That build the body conscious and the soul
Self-conscious. Could these elements elect,
These changeful properties of Matter, one
In all diversity, that chance or doom
Delivered up to be mankind, forget
Their burning passion in the nebula
Though love itself came after? Never doubt
That visions of Elysium and the abyss
Of fire denote enduring thoughts antique
As time of that supernal ecstasy,
When Matter incandescent filled and rent
The shuddering womb of universal space —
Material memories once the scourge of
men,
But now resolved and known for what they
are.
Yet they torment me? Yes, and terribly:
Because the conscious Matter which I am,
Beginning to surrender consciousness,
Recoils from dissolution and divorce.
To be dispersed in elemental sport
Of heedless energy — the uncontrolled
Imagination of the Universe,
That flashes out an instant nebula
By chance encounter in the spacious dark
Of ancient suns extinct and vagrant, turns
To teeming wonder every water-drop,
Afflicts the human race with hope, attunes
The nightingale, and launches in the deep
The monstrous rorqual: to be left once
more
A scattered wreck of groping elements
Without remembrance, judgement,
wisdom, choice,
Perturbs the divers stuff that men are of;
Wherefore when sleep in mimicry of death
Dissolves self-consciousness, the hideous
dreams
That wake me shrieking….
Let them come again
When sleep rehearses death, or death itself
Takes up the cue: no dreams of mine are
they,
But Matter’s dreams of old experience
wrought
In imperceptive atoms: while I wake
I apprehend and master time and space,
For this self-consciousness is masterdom.
— An excerpt from (the very end of) The Testament of a Prime Minister (1904), which offers an inferno-like vision of East London.
Davidson was a Scottish schoolteacher, poet, playwright and author. The SFE notes that “his intensely urban poetry, much of which focuses on science and technology from an almost mystical point of view, had a shaping influence now forgotten.” Don’t be fooled by crappy reissues of this book whose back covers claim that Davidson was a Prime Minister of England.
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.