FOURTH DIMENSION
By:
April 15, 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.
His life was strangely hedged about
By three, though he seemed not to know it:
One whom he loved, who shut him out;
One hid her passion in her doubt;
One was too fond and wise to show it.
The first blew on desire’s dark flame
Until he tossed with every flicker
In agonies of sad self-blame,
That left him tired, but not yet tame
Enough to cease love’s tireless bicker.
The second tried in vain to bind him,
Uncertain of what stirred in each.
Walking through labyrinths to find him,
She saw him shorn, but could not blind
him;
And silence was her wittiest speech.
The third had known him since she bore
him;
And suffered, though she may have smiled,
To know that barren wishes tore him,
When one was ready to adore him
As if he were not still her child.
Too wise to hate the one he wanted,
Too fond to pity her he scorned,
Her hours, like his own, were haunted
By devils that might well have daunted
A monster likewise hoofed and horned.
The first, meeting his mother, knew her
A woman very like her own.
The second wondered how to woo her,
While ever seeking to eschew her,
Fearful of what she must have known.
And so their days were all one tangle
Of this, one dropped, and that, one dared.
While he, from his peculiar angle,
Half-wished that loneliness might strangle
What they so curiously shared.
— first published in the July 1921 edition of Poetry magazine.
At the MIT website WATCHERS OF THE MOON: Poetry, Science, and Technology in the Long Nineteenth Century, we read the following about this poem and its title:
Just a metaphor, like “romantic triangle”, but indicative of how the idea of higher dimensions made inroads into the general imagination.
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.