“DOWN HIDDEN CAUSEWAYS…”
By:
September 13, 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.
Down hidden causeways of the universe
Through space-time’s cold
Indifferent airs I strolled,
A pointless star till in my course
I happened on the sun
And in a spurt of fire to her did run
That heavenly body as I neared began
To make response,
And heaved with fire at once
One wave of gathered heat o’erran
Her all and came to a head,
A mountain based upon an ardent bed
(Faith may move mountains, but love’s
twice as strong,
For love can raise
A mountain where none was
Also can prove astronomers wrong
Who deem the stars too hot
For life — here is a star that has begot)
Soon from the mother body torn and
whirled
By tidal pull
And left in space to cool
That mountain top will be a world
Treading its own orbit,
And look to her for warmth, to me for wit.
— A section (no. 17) of the author’s 1931 book-length poem From Feathers to Iron. The title comes from a Keats poem.
PS: Note that Day-Lewis’s first child, (the journalist and author) Sean Day-Lewis, was born in 1931.
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.