WHITE DEATH
By:
August 23, 2026
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.
Methought the world was bound with final
frost;
The sun, made hueless as with fear and
awe,
Illumined yet the lands it could not thaw.
Then on my road, with instant evening
crost,
Death stood, and in its shadowy films
enwound,
Mine eyes forgot the light, until I came
Where poured the inseparate,
unshadowed flame
Of phantom suns in self-irradiance
drowned.
Death lay revealed in all its haggardness —
Immitigable wastes horizonless;
Profundities that held nor bar nor veil;
All hues wherewith the suns and worlds
were dyed
In light invariable nullified;
All darkness rendered shelterless and
pale.
— First published 1912, one reads here.
Describes a surreal, apocalyptic vision of the world bound in a final, freezing cosmic frost. (A dead or terrified sun fails to warm a frozen Earth.) The narrator journeys through an unthawed, hueless landscape where Death emerges as a physical presence, stripping away all color, light, and shadow into a stark, blinding void.
One of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite CAS poems.
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.