DYMER
By:
December 12, 2022
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.
“There is a City which men call in scorn
The Perfect City — eastward of this wood—
You’ve heard about the place. There I was
born.
I’m one of them, their work. Their sober
mood,
The ordered life, the laws, are in my blood
—A life… well, less than happy, something
more
Than the red greed and lusts that went
before.
“All in one day, one man and at one blow
Brought ruin on us all. There was a boy
—Blue eyes, large limbs, were all he had to
show,
You need no greater prophets to destroy.
He seemed a man asleep. Sorrow and joy
Had passed him by—the dreamiest, safest
man,
The most obscure, until this curse began.
“Then — how or why it was, I cannot say—
This Dymer, this fool baby pink-and-white,
Went mad beneath his quiet face. One day,
With nothing said, he rose and laughed
outright
Before his master: then, in all our sight,
Even where we sat to watch, he struck him
dead
And screamed with laughter once again
and fled.
“Lord! how it all comes back. How still the
place is,
And he there lying dead… only the sound
Of a bluebottle buzzing… sharpened faces
Strained, gaping from the benches all
around…
The dead man hunched and quiet with no
wound,
And minute after minute terror creeping
With dreadful hopes to set the wild heart
leaping.
“Then one by one at random (no word
spoken)
We slipt out to the sunlight and away.
We felt the empty sense of something
broken
And comfortless adventure all that day.
Men loitered at their work and could not
say
What trembled at their lips or what new
light
Was in girls’ eyes. Yet we endured till night.
“Then… I was lying awake in bed,
Shot through with tremulous thought, lame
hopes, and sweet
Desire of reckless days — with burning
head.
And then there came a clamour from the
street,
Came nearer, nearer, nearer — stamping
feet
And screaming song and curses and a
shout
Of ‘Who’s for Dymer, Dymer? — Up and
out!’
“We looked out from our window.
Thronging there
A thousand of our people, girls and men,
Raved and reviled and shouted by the glare
Of torches and bonfire blaze. And then
Came tumult from the street beyond: again
‘Dymer!’ they cried. And farther off there
came
The sound of gun-fire and the gleam of
flame.
“I rushed down with the rest. Oh, we were
mad!
After this, it’s all nightmare. The black sky
Between the housetops framed was all we
had
To tell us that the old world could not die
And that we were no gods. The flood ran
high
When first I came, but after was the worse,
Oh, to recall…! On Dymer rest the curse!
“Our leader was a hunchback with red hair
—Bran was his name. He had that kind of
force
About him that will hold your eyes fast
there
As in ten miles of green one patch of gorse
Will hold them — do you know? His lips
were coarse,
But his eyes like a prophet’s — seemed to
fill
The whole face. And his tongue was never
still.
“He cried: ‘As Dymer broke, we’ll break the
chain.
The world is free. They taught you to be
chaste
And labour and bear orders and refrain.
Refrain? From what? All’s good enough.
We’ll taste
Whatever is. Life murmurs from the waste
Beneath the mind… who made the
reasoning part
The jailer of the wild gods in the heart?’
“We were a ragtail crew — wild-haired,
half-dressed,
All shouting, ‘Up, for Dymer! Up away!’
Yet each one always watching all the rest
And looking to his back. And some were
gay
Like drunk man, some were cringing,
pinched and grey
With terror dry on the lip. (The older ones
Had had the sense enough to bring their
guns.)
“The wave where I was swallowed swelled
and broke,
After long surge, into the open square.
And here there was more light: new
clamour woke.
Here first I heard the bullets sting the air
And went hot round the heart. Our lords
were there
In barricade with all their loyal men.
For every one man loyal Bran led ten.
“Then charge and cheer and bubbling sobs
of death,
We hovered on their front. Like swarming
bees
Their spraying bullets came — no time for
breath.
I saw men’s stomachs fall out on their
knees;
And shouting faces, while they shouted,
freeze
Into black, bony masks. Before we knew
We’re into them… ‘Swine!’ — ‘Die, then’ —
‘That’s for you.’
“The next that I remember was a lull
And sated pause. I saw an old, old man
Lying before my feet with shattered skull,
And both my arms dripped red. And then
came Bran
And at his heels a hundred murderers ran,
With prisoners now, clamouring to take
and try them
And burn them, wedge their nails up,
crucify them.
“God!… Once the lying spirit of a cause
With maddening words dethrones the
mind of men,
They’re past the reach of prayer. The
eternal laws
Hate them. Their eyes will not come clean
again,
But doom and strong delusion drive them
then,
Without ruth, without rest… the iron
laughter
Of the immortal mouths goes hooting
after.
“And we had firebrands too. Tower after
tower
Fell sheathed in thundering flame. The
street was like
A furnace mouth. We had them in our
power!
Then was the time to mock them and to
strike,
To flay men and spit women on the pike,
Bidding them dance. Wherever the most
shame
Was done the doer called on Dymer’s
name.
“Faces of men in torture… from my mind
They will not go away. The East lay still
In darkness when we left the town behind
Flaming to light the fields. We’d had our
will:
We sang, ‘Oh, we will make the frost distil
From Time’s grey forehead into living dew
And break whatever has been and build
new.’[“]
— Excerpt from C.S. Lewis’s Dymer, a narrative poem published pseudonymously in 1926.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: H.D.’s STARS WHEEL IN PURPLE | Clark Ashton Smith’s FROM PLANET UNTO PLANET WHIRLED | Anonymous’s ASTRONOMIC JOSH | Rudyard Kipling’s THE SECRET OF THE MACHINES | Randolph Bourne’s SABOTAGE | Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | Ford Madox Ford’s GREY MATTER | W.E. Henley’s A SONG OF SPEED | H.L. Mencken’s A BALLAD OF LOOKING | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Vachel Lindsay’s THE SCIENTIFIC ASPIRATION | Thomas Hardy’s EPITAPH FOR G.K. CHESTERTON | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | Charles M. Doughty’s THE CLIFFS | William Butler Yeats’s THE SECOND COMING | Guillaume Apollinaire’s THE LITTLE CAR | Archibald MacLeish’s MAN! | Max Beerbohm’s A SEQUELULA TO “THE DYNASTS” | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Michael Roberts’s NOTE ON Θ, Φ, and Ψ | D.H. Lawrence’s FUTURE WAR | Laurence Binyon’s NUMBERS | Frederik Pohl’s ELEGY TO A DEAD PLANET: LUNA | F.V. Branford’s FAREWELL TO MATHEMATICS | D.H. Lawrence’s THE EVENING LAND | Carl Sandburg’s MANUAL SYSTEM | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | D.H. Lawrence’s THE REVOLUTIONARY | Blaise Cendrar’s ORION | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Charles Buxton Going’s THE SONG OF STEEL | D.H. Lawrence’s UNDERNEATH | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Louis Untermeyer’s PORTRAIT OF A MACHINE | D.H. Lawrence’s BOMBARDMENT | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | D.H. Lawrence’s TO LET GO OR TO HOLD ON —? | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | W.J. Turner’s MISS AMERICA | Julian Huxley’s TO A DANCER | W.B. Yeats’s SAILING TO BYZANTIUM | John Collings Squire’s THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | Julian Huxley’s COSMIC DEATH | Robinson Jeffers’s SCIENCE | D.H. Lawrence’s SUBURBS ON A HAZY DAY | A.S. Eddington’s ONE THING IS CERTAIN | Rudyard Kipling’s THE TRADE | Emil Raymond’s TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE STAR | D.H. Lawrence’s THE TRIUMPH OF THE MACHINE | Marianne Moore’s IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR | Vachel Lindsay’s EUCLID | D.H. Lawrence’s GIVE US GODS | Alfred Noyes’s WATCHERS OF THE SKY | Edna St. Vincent Millay’s EUCLID ALONE | W.J. Turner’s IN TIME LIKE GLASS | Emma Rounds’s PLANE GEOMETRY | Robert Grant’s THE SUPERMAN | D.H. Lawrence’s THE THIRD THING | Ralph Milne Farley’s THE END OF THE WORLD | Robinson Jeffers’s ROAN STALLION | A.S. Eddington’s INFINITY | Karel Čapek’s WHAT OUR AGE HAS DONE | D.H. Lawrence’s ROBOT POEMS | Mina Loy’s LUNAR BAEDEKER | John Lehmann’s THIS EXCELLENT MACHINE | Jean Toomer’s HER LIPS ARE COPPER WIRE | D.H. Lawrence’s RELATIVITY | Clark Ashton Smith’s AFTERWARDS | D.H. Lawrence’s SPACE | Ronald Ross’s THE ANNIVERSARY | Rudyard Kipling’s MACDONOUGH’S SONG | Robert Bridges’ THE TESTAMENT OF BEAUTY | Clark Ashton Smith’s THE STAR-TREADER | Archibald MacLeish’s EPISTLE TO BE LEFT TO THE EARTH | D.H. Lawrence’s LET US BE MEN | Michael Roberts’s MIDNIGHT | William Stanley Braithwaite’s DEL CASCAR | F.V. Branford’s THE MOON | A.S. Eddington’s “THERE ONCE WAS A BREATHY BABOON” | Michael Roberts’s PERSPECTIVE | Arthur Schnitzler’s LEINBACH’S PROOF | Michael Roberts’s ROCKS ARE IMMUTABLE | F.V. Branford’s MASTER CELLS | Clark Ashton Smith’s THE NEMESIS OF SUNS | D.H. Lawrence’s DARK SATANIC MILLS | William Empson’s LETTER I | Amy Lowell’s MIDDAY AND AFTERNOON | D.H. Lawrence’s THE GULF | Wallace Stevens’s FABLIAU OF FLORIDA | Kenneth Rexroth’s “HEAVEN IS FULL OF DEFINITE STARS…” | Leslie Pinckney Hill’s ARMAGEDDON | William Stanley Braithwaite’s DISTANCES | Lucian B. Watkins’s SAN FRANCISCO’S 18th OF APRIL (1906) | D.H. Lawrence’s HOLD BACK! | C. Day Lewis’s TRANSITIONAL POEM | Wallace Stevens’s THE IDEA OF A COLONY | D.H. Lawrence’s MEN LIKE GODS | Valery Bryusov’s THE DAYS SHALL COME OF FINAL DESOLATION | Amy Lowell’s A COMPARISON | D.H. Lawrence’s MEN AND MACHINES | Herbert Read’s MUTATIONS OF THE PHŒNIX | T.E. Hulme’s CINDERS | T.S. Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND | Hugh MacDiarmid’s STONY LIMITS | Herbert Read’s THE RETREAT | D.H. Lawrence’s SOULS TO SAVE | Laurence Binyon’s THE ZEPPELIN | Herbert Read’s THE ANALYSIS OF LOVE | Amy Lowell’s VENICE AGAIN | Hugh MacDiarmid’s THALAMUS | Paul Valéry’s THE YOUNG FATE | Herbert Read’s EQUATION | William Empson’s INVITATION TO JUNO | W.W. Gibson’s WINDOWS | Herbert Read’s THE INNOCENT EYE | W.W. Gibson’s THE MACHINE | C. Day Lewis’s FROM FEATHERS TO IRON | W.H. Auden’s IN THE LAST OF THE OLD YEAR | Michael Roberts’s SIRIUS B | Hart Crane’s LINES SENT TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ | Robert Garioch’s TRANSLATIONS FROM AN UNWRITTEN POEM | R.S. Thomas’s AT IT | Louis MacNeice’s REFLECTIONS | Osbert Sitwell’s THE END | Valery Bryusov’s THREE APPLES | George C. Wallis’s THE CITIES | Gordon Bottomley’s TO IRON-FOUNDERS AND OTHERS | Valery Bryusov’s DUSK | Edith Sitwell’s THE LADY WITH THE SEWING MACHINE | Vachel Lindsay’s THE HORRID VOICE OF SCIENCE | Wallace Stevens’s “RATIONALISTS, WEARING SQUARE HATS” | Robinson Jeffers’s TRIAD | Archibald MacLeish’s SIGNATURE FOR TEMPO | Ambrose Beirce’s THE PASSING SHOW | Valery Bryusov’s THE COMING HUNS | & more to come.