FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG

By: Aldous Huxley
March 8, 2023

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.

A million million spermatozoa,
  All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
  Dare hope to survive.

And among that billion minus one
  Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new
     Donne —
  But the One was Me.

Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
  Taking ark while the others remained
     outside!
Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,
  If you’d quietly died!

— From Leda (1920)

Jerome Mecker’s Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic offers the following insights:

The Philosophers’ Songs, taken together, form a self-parodying series. We are invited to imagine the befuddled first, second, fifth, and ninth philosophers (we don’t know what’s become of the othere) publicly “singing” bleak laments about their collective inability to form adequate explanatory hypotheses about how things are.

In a 21 July 1918 letter to Julian Huxley, Aldous explains that these “songs” were originally intended to form a part of the poem “Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt” (“Suns Can Set, and Suns Can Rise Again”), which would become the final poem in Leda. The letter refers sarcastically to “The Fifth Philosopher’s Song” as a “most lovely” little poem “which comes into it [‘Soles’] at one point.” Before quoting the as yet untitled “Fifth Philosopher’s Song” in its entirety, Aldous tells Julian it is intended to be “quite Tennysonian, both in respect to its perfection of form and in its recognition, so highly acclaimed by Grand Pater [T. H. Huxley] in the late Poet Laureate, of the truths of Science.” The poems are, that is to say, a satire of the sort of consoling lyrics that Tennyson gives us in “In Memoriam A.H.H.” (1850), which explores the random cruelty of Nature seen from the conflicting perspectives of materialist science and declining Christian faith in the Victorian Era, and which suggests that everything happens according to a divinely appointed program. In Memoriam‘s progression from crisis to resolution affirms that the knottiest philosophical problems can still be solved; it attests to the universe’s rational design.

The fifth philosopher finds it impossible to perceive a grand design. Either ignorant or a fraud, Tennyson reduced competitive existence to a level the human mind could comprehend. If the world operated in deference to Tennyson’s unscientific attribution of a “secret meaning” to Nature’s “deeds,” sperm destined to produce weak-minded singing philosophers would give vaginal preference to the next Newton or another Donne; the Victorian poet’s “larger hope” would be served. […] The modern philosopher’s sperm count, like the use of the copulative metaphor in “Leda,” discredits Victorian fastidiousness as another kind of “perfection of form” false to life. When the fifth philosopher fears that Nature, in allowing him to be born, made a mistake, Huxley expresses contempt for the pacifying conclusion Tennyson resorted to in poem CXXVIII: namely, “That all, as in some piece of art, / Is toil cooperant to an end.”

***

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.