“HULKS OF BLACK TURBINES…”
By:
November 29, 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.
Hulks of black turbines all mangled and
roaring,
Battering egress through ramparted walls…
Mouthing of engines, made rabid with
power,
Into the holocaust snorting and plunging…
Mighty converters torn from their axes,
Flung to the furnaces, vomiting fire,
Jumbled in white-heated masses
disshapen…
Writhing in flame-tortured levers of iron…
Gnashing of steel serpents twisting and
dying…
Screeching of steam-glutted cauldrons
rending…
Shock of leviathans prone on each other…
Scale flanks touching, ore entering ore…
Steel haunches closing and grappling and
swaying
In the waltz of the mating locked
mammoths of iron,
Tasting the turbulent fury of living,
Mad with a moment’s exuberant living!
Crash of devastating hammers despoiling…
Hands inexorable, marring
What hands had so cunningly moulded…
Structures of steel welded, subtly
tempered,
Marvelous wrought of the wizards of ore,
Torn into octaves discordantly clashing,
Chords never final but onward progressing
In monstrous fusion of sound ever smiting
on sound in mad vortices whirling…
Till the ear, tortured, shrieks for cessation
Of the raving inharmonies hatefully
mingling…
The fierce obligato the steel pipes are
screaming
The blare of the rude molten music of
Iron…
— Excerpt from “The Song of Iron,” found in Others for 1919; an anthology of the new verse (1920). Originally published in the author’s 1918 collection The Ghetto.
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.