DESERT PLACES
By:
November 12, 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.
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in
snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it — it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less —
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty
spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human
race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
— “Desert Places” was composed by Frost in 1933, while he was suffering a series of illnesses and struggling with bouts of depression. Frost claims that he wrote the poem straight off “without fumbling a sentence.” It appeared in The American Mercury in April 1934, before being collected in Frost’s 1936 book A Further Range.
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.