“WHAT IS THAT SOUND…”
By:
December 14, 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.
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked
earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet
air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
— An excerpt from part V (“What the Thunder Said”) of The Waste Land (1922). This section of Eliot’s poem envisions some sort of apocalypse — atomic bomb?
In Part I, Eliot introduces the idea of an “Unreal City” by blending the commuters trudging over London Bridge with the souls in the first circle of Dante’s Inferno. Another evocation of unreal cities occurs here in Part V — a ten-line series of bewildered questions about rural chaos and urban destruction.
London is now placed in context with Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria and Vienna, all centers of empires and cultural hubs for their time, but here they are cracking, falling apart and reforming into something unreal.
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.