REVEILLE
By:
May 20, 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.
Come forth, you workers!
Let the fires go cold —
Let the iron spill out, out of the troughs —
Let the iron run wild
Like a red bramble on the floors —
Leave the mill and the foundry and the
mine
And the shrapnel lying on the wharves —
Leave the desk and the shuttle and the
loom
Come,
With your ashen lives,
Your lives like dust in your hands.
I call upon you, workers.
It is not yet light
But I beat upon your doors.
You say you await the Dawn
But I say you are the Dawn.
Come, in your irresistible unspent force
And make new light upon the mountains.
You have turned deaf ears to others —
Me you shall hear.
Out of the mouths of turbines,
Out of the turgid throats of engines,
Over the whisling steam,
You shall hear me shrilly piping.
Your mills I shall enter like the wind,
And blow upon your hearts,
Kindling the slow fire.
They think they have tamed you,
workers —
Beaten you to a tool
To scoop up a hot honor
Till it be cool —
But out of the passion of the red frontiers
A great flower trembles and burns and
glows
And each of its petals is a people.
Come forth, you workers —
Clinging to your stable
And your wisp of warm straw —
Let the fires grow cold,
Let the iron spill out of the troughs,
Let the iron run wild
Like a red bramble on the floors …
As our forefathers stood on the prairies
So let us stand in a ring,
Let us tear up their prisons like grass
And beat them to barricades —
Let us meet the fire of their guns
With a greater fire,
Till the birds shall fly to the mountains
For one safe bough.
— First published in 1920, when the poem was included in her second collection, Sun-Up and Other Poems. In Mark Stevens’ Red Modernism (2017), we read that the lines “They think they have tamed you, workers — / Beaten you to a tool / To scoop up a hot honor / Till it be cool —”
echo Marx’s account of capitalist ontology as a chiasmus wherein humans become objects and objects take on a life of their own. Contracted as variable capital, the worker is degraded to the status of an inhuman “tool,” whereas the product of his labor, the commodity, absorbs his humanity (what this poem refers to as “honor”), which coagulates into the sellable object. In striking opposition to this grim reality, communism presents itself as the quintessence of life: a living, blossoming flower, prospering in “the passion of red frontiers,” whose constituent workers all retain their singular petal-like integrity.
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.