SONNET XV

By: Maximilian Voloshin
January 30, 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.

(From the Sonnet-cycle “Lunaria”)

Pure pearl of silence brooding on the sky,
Presider o’er conception, lamp of dreams,
Altar of nightly spells, of crystal gleams,
Queen of the waters where thou lov’st to
     lie,

With what desire, where the long waves
     sigh,
Through my dark crucifixions, toward thy
     beams,
Toward Dian, toward fierce Hecate, there
     streams
The vision yet unlived that shall not die.

How strange thy diamond delirium shines
In thy fair hollows, in thy joyless lines,
And in the flashing mica of thy seas.

In listless ether thou art horror’s face,
Thou, longing’s cry, whom icy gaolers
     freeze,
Thou, dead world’s avid corpse, cast out on
     space.

— 1913. From Russian Poetry: An Anthology, chosen and translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky (1927).

One of several poems in the RADIUM AGE POETRY series about the moon as a dead planet.

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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.