Question

The End of Science Fiction by Lisel Mueller 1996. How do the lines "Invent us as we were / before our bodies glittered / and we stopped bleeding" (Lines 24-26), support the poem's theme?

Answer 1

Those three lines distill the poem’s central complaint: the loss of messy, vulnerable humanity under the sheen of technological progress and spectacle, and the poet’s plea that art re‑create what has been erased.

- “Invent us as we were” is an imperative: the speaker asks to be reconstituted by imagination or language. That verb highlights that what’s lost can’t simply be remembered — it must be re‑made by art.
- “before our bodies glittered” contrasts a new, glossy surface (glamor, spectacle, technological polish, the “future” made real) with an earlier, unvarnished human state. Glitter implies artifice and distance from physical actuality.
- “and we stopped bleeding” gives the cost of that glitter: the disappearance of vulnerability, pain, mortality — signs that we are alive. Stopping bleeding sounds like a cure, but here it reads as numbing and dehumanizing.

Together the lines support the poem’s theme by asserting that the end of “science fiction” is also the end of a fuller, embodied human imagination: the future we once dreamed has rendered us smooth and bloodless. The speaker turns to poetic invention to restore the precarious, bleeding human beings that progress and spectacle have effaced.