TWO SUNSETS
By:
June 5, 2025
A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.
Last Citizen of Earth:
‘Tis sickening! I’m near to death
Of this foul gas, the putrid breath
Of yon damned comet.
I’m alone
With all men dead. Who could have known,
Who could foresee, and what prevent
This ghastly, cosmic accident?
Has Mankind really lived in vain
After such aeon-bitter pain?
After the toil it took to shape
A human creature from an ape?
And after all the fruitless power
To make an ape from something lower?
You sun! You’re looking sickly too,
With your smoke-dimmed, anemic blue!
You’re as far gone as I. You’re weak,
And ill, and grown extremely meek
Beside that cometary flame.
Well, it took more than Man to tame
Your fire; but now you’ve lived your span —
I’ve lived you down, and in me Man
Outlived you!
— Excerpt from “Two Sunsets,” which first appeared in the December 1922 issue of the Wisconsin Literary Magazine, an undergraduate publication from the University of Wisconsin. See: Lunaria and Other Poems (1988).
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.