The radiance of that star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now Glitters up there my eye may never
see,
And so the time lag teases me with how
Love that loves now
may not reach me until Its first desire is spent. The star’s impulse Must wait
for eyes to claim it beautiful And love arrived may find us somewhere else.
Elizabeth Jennings
In spite of a good education I came to appreciate music
late in life, and to appreciate poetry even later. The turning point can be
identified: I had done a talk on astronomy for a group of women, showing
slides, explaining the size and scale of the universe, and how long it took
light to travel the huge distances. Afterwards, Jennifer, a friend in the
audience, gave me a copy of Elizabeth Jennings’s poem ‘Delay’, and its power
and its appropriateness immediately hit me.
I have given many talks on astronomy to lay
audiences; I believe I make the subject accessible, explain things clearly, and
hold the audience’s interest. In such talks it is easy to play the wow,
gee-whiz element of astronomy, it is easy to raise the hairs on the back of the
neck talking about our place in the universe and the origin and future
evolution of the universe. And there are photos of many wonderfully beautiful
galaxies, nebulae, and groups of stars to give visual impact. As a woman I
probably seem more approachable and less threatening than a male speaker, and I
certainly get lots of very interesting questions on all manner of topics after
each talk (provided the Chair does not get twitchy and close it down!). To
draw others, especially women, into science, I would like to give fair space to
the human side of science, but lack vehicles with which to do so in these talks. So I have always been left a little
unsatisfied by the exclusively scientific content of my own talks.
Elizabeth Jennings’s poem (which opens her 2002
Carcanet New Collected Poems) is not only
powerful and appropriate, it is brief as well—just eight lines long. As such I
could quote it in its entirety in one of my talks. And more and more I have
done so, and included other non-scientific pieces of writing in my talks. I
suspect the more ‘nerdish’ members of my audience do not know what to make of
these pieces but, consistently, female audience members will come up to me
afterwards and speak appreciatively of their inclusion. Such material should
help the non-scientists in the audience relate to the topic, may woo those who
are suspicious of science or scientists, and demonstrate that astronomy is part
of our cultural heritage.
From those eight lines has grown a whole new
interest, and a new dimension to life. I started ‘collecting’ poetry with an
astronomical theme to use in my talks, and found it was speaking to something
in me. The collecting acquired its own impetus. I compared my collection with
those of others, and at tense times (such as waiting for the outcome of a job
interview) when I could not concentrate on work, found that the poetry soothed
and steadied me. I have always loved words and have always appreciated the
richness and diversity of English vocabulary. Rhythm has also always appealed
to me—expressed usually through dancing—so perhaps it is no surprise that
poetry appeals.
The collecting has been quite challenging. Some
poets (Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Diane Ackerman, for example) frequently
write on astronomical themes, but the majority appear only to write one or two
poems, and my impression is that those one or two are rarely included in
general anthologies or selections. Word of mouth and casual references have led
to research on the World Wide Web and the tracking down of many poems
(blessings be to Google!). Tracking down the full reference has been as much
work again!
Science is great—I would have difficulty living
without it, and yet I could not live by science alone. There are other
dimensions to life, other ways of thinking and behaving besides the scientific
that ideally I need in my life in order to feel reasonably rounded. I like
poetry because of its complementary nature, because it is so different from
doing science. In saying this I do not want to give the impression that science
is totally aseptic, mechanistic, and lacking in imagination. I have long argued
that the scientific method as currently taught to our students underplays the
role of imagination, synthesis, and creativity; we focus on how hypotheses and
models, once created, are tested, and do not give enough attention to how they
are created. Scientists do not always recognize the imagination needed to be a
good scientist!
I also appreciate poetry for its healing
properties, and clearly am not alone in this. It was striking how, in the days
following September 11, people were turning to poetry, sharing quotations with
each other, displaying snippets of verse and using them as memorials. But what
is this healing? I believe it is more than giving comfort, in the sense of
easing or making comfortable (although it does that too). It is closer to the
original meaning of comfort—making strong. It strengthens because it recognizes
and articulates hurt that many of us experience but may not be able to express.
That recognition, that confirmation that others have similar experience, is
reassuring. This is the start of the healing.
Behind the complementary nature of science and
poetry there is of course a divide. My computer’s ‘spell checker’ symbolizes
that for me. Spell checker does not like abbreviations like ‘o’er’, it does not
recognize classical illusions, it prefers a capital letter after a line break,
and it desires verbs at regular intervals. It is methodical, consistent, and
logical—and most of the time I am grateful for that. But we lose a lot if we
can only express ourselves in spell-checker- approved language; we lose the
less tangible, the phrasing and breathing, the rhythms and urge and patterns
and shape, some of the allusions and illusions, indeed the very power of
poetry. Poetry addresses the heart as well as the head, the emotional as well
as the rational, and seems to me to do so better than prose. It reaches where
no other words can reach; and the assiduous spell checker is blind to its
nuances.
Modern astronomy started after World War II,
when technologies such as radar and rocketry, developed during the war, were
applied afterwards in the expanding field of astronomy. Our vision widened as
the new astronomies, especially radio and X-ray, enabled us to see not just in
visible light, but in other wavebands as well. Radar quickly became radio
astronomy, often using actual radar dishes and reflectors as well as many of
the same techniques. In Britain V2 rockets developed into the Skylark rocket
programme, through which small pieces of equipment could be given brief flights
above the Earth’s atmosphere. The rockets then became the launch vehicles for
artificial satellites. These launch vehicles opened up the far infrared,
ultra-violet, X-ray, and gamma-ray astronomy bands, which are normally blocked
for us by the earth’s atmosphere. The intellectual stimulus was huge. It was
fuelled in the late 1950s by the Soviet launch of the first artificial
satellite, Sputnik, the realization by the West that we had fallen behind, and
the consequent emphasis on science.
I have taken 1950 as the start date for this
essay. Since then astronomers have discovered quasars and pulsars, black holes
and brown dwarfs, dark matter and dark energy. We have come to accept that
there was a Big Bang, and have detected microwave radiation left over from that
explosion. The size of the universe is appreciated (although we still have
trouble envisaging such large scales) and we have an understanding of how stars
are born, live and die. We can predict the future of our Sun, although are on less
certain ground when we try to predict the future of the Universe.
Gathering and reflecting on one hundred and
twenty or so post- 1950 astronomy poems it has become apparent to me that while
radio telescopes feature in several, none of the other new wavebands do. X-ray
astronomy which, arguably, has had as much impact on astrophysics does not get
a mention, although objects like black holes discovered by that branch of
astronomy do. Why the distinction? Perhaps it is because radio telescopes are
on the ground while most of the telescopes that operate in the other new
wavebands have to be launched into space. Furthermore, radio telescopes are
frequently big structures, like Jodrell Bank, and highly visible, whereas
telescopes to be launched by rocket have to be compact (or fold up compactly).
We are familiar with tuning into the radio waves broadcast by a particular
station, but understand less well that similarly we can tune into other
wavebands. So perhaps the choice of subject for poetry reflects visibility and
familiarity.
Though their work predates the period covered by
this essay, it is worth remarking that Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and Robert
Frost were keen amateur astronomers, each possessing a telescope. Highly
developed skills in poetry and in astronomy are rarely found in the same
person, but there have been some noteworthy familial links between poets and
astronomers. Robinson Jeffers had a brother, Hamilton, who was an astronomer at Lick
Observatory, California, and Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961) was the daughter of an
astronomer; her father was Director of the Flower Observatory, University of
Pennsylvania. Percival Lowell, the astronomer who founded the Lowell
Observatory in Arizona, was a distant cousin of Robert Lowell (1917-77), but
died the year before the poet was born. The dedication of Gwyneth Lewis’s
(1959- ) book Zero Gravity reads, in part,
‘to commemorate the voyage of my cousin Joe Tanner and the crew of Space
Shuttle STS-82 to repair the Hubble Space Telescope’. Rebecca Elson (1960-99) was
of that rare class—a professional astronomer who wrote poetry. Why, one
wonders, are there not more Rebecca Elsons? I know scientists who paint,
sculpt, dance, sing, play musical instruments, and one or two who write science
fiction, but Rebecca apart, none who write poetry (or will admit to it). Why?
Most of my collection of astronomical poetry is written by non-scientists.
When I first read it, I thought Frederick Seidel’s poem
‘The New Cosmology’ was referring to a major new array of millimetre radio telescopes
about to be built in Chile (called ALMA—the Atacama Large Millimetre Array).
However, having checked the date of publication (1989) I suspect Seidel is
referring to an earlier Swedish- European telescope. His poem will get even
better with time, for ALMA will have many ‘dishes’ and will look more of an
invasion, perched on a high plateau. One plan is to have the telescopes
arranged in a spiral pattern on the ground, which will look intriguing to God
or anyone else viewing from above.
Above
the Third World, looking down on a fourth:
Life’s aerial photograph of a new radio telescope
Discolouring an inch of mountainside in Chile,
A
Martian invasion of dish receivers.
The
tribes of Israel in their tents Must have looked like this to God—
A
naive stain of wildflowers on a hill,
A
field of ear trumpets listening for Him,
Stuck listening to
space like someone blind ..
The poem concerns the imaginable and the unimaginable, and
how the latter is ousting the former; it is about how our growing knowledge is
demolishing myth, and there is a touch of the classic science and religion
debate here too. Seidel struggles to take all these in, but gives up and lapses
into silence. Silence is an appropriate response in such circumstances. While
it is always nice to have a positive, well- turned ending, an unresolved, open,
searching end is nearer where we, the astronomers, are. Arguably it is where
society should be too.
The theme of listening is one which might well appeal to
poets tuned in to the precise calibrations of language, but radio astronomers
also ‘listen’. Diane Ackerman puts this elegantly in her poem ‘We Are
Listening’:
As our metal eyes wake to absolute night
where whispers fly from the beginning of time we cup our ears to the heavens.
We are listening
on the volcanic rim of Flagstaff and in the fields
beyond Boston, in a great array that blooms like coral from the desert floor,
on highwire webs patrolled by computer spiders in Puerto Rico.
We are listening for a sound beyond us, beyond sound,
searching for a lighthouse in the breakwaters of our
uncertainty an electronic murmur, a bright, fragile I am.
Small
as tree frogs
staking
out one end
of an
endless swamp,
we
are listening
through
the longest night
we
imagine, which dawns
between the life and
times of stars.2
What wonderful use of language, and what fun for the
professional astronomer to be able to recognize and see afresh each of the telescopes
she alludes to! The somewhat Churchillian ‘We are listening I on the volcanic
rim of Flagstaff I and in the fields beyond Boston’, with
its echoes of his proclamation ‘We will fight them .. .’, contrasts wonderfully
with the faintness of the whisper of a signal that is being searched for. Diane
Ackerman writes confidently and authoritatively on astronomical subjects. As a
Ph.D. student at Cornell she wanted to work with the arts and the sciences, so
on her doctoral committee had both a poet and the astronomer Carl Sagan. She
later worked as a researcher for his ‘Cosmos’ TV series. The arts-science divide
is not something she admits to, and her work combines superb imagery, excellent
use of words, a sense of wonder and scientific accuracy. She is perhaps best
known for an early book of astronomical poetry, The
Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, which included accurate and up-to-date
material on the planets, often presented in a novel way (see, for example, her
‘Saturn’).3 We don’t have to listen that hard to hear the
existential questions. Ackerman does not seem too bothered by them however, but
is prepared to work with them rather than strive to have dominion over them and
find ‘solutions’ that might be premature. As Rilke said in a letter of advice
to a young poet, she is prepared to live the questions.
Miroslav Holub’s ‘Night at the Observatory’
contains one of the earliest references to a radio astronomy observatory. It
forms an atmospheric background for a courting couple. Gradually the ‘camera’
pulls back from the couple to note their surroundings, and then pulls back even
further to consider the on-going-ness of the universe, independent of life. For
me the most telling line in Holub’s poem is ‘Above the fields the wires hissed
like iguanas.’4 A purely
descriptive line, what is the attraction? It is the identification, the
articulation of something I knew but had never managed to express—for me that
is a large part of what poetry is about. As one who spent most of her graduate
student years in a cold, windy field surrounded by the posts and wires that
formed a radio telescope (and did some courting there), I can affirm that that
is exactly how it sounded. Neither the sound, nor the phrase, is an obvious
one, so he must have been writing out of experience; I wonder which observatory
it was that he visited? But you and I are dated, Miroslav. They no longer make
radio telescopes from strands of wire—they’ve gone sophisticated, up-market,
with dish-like structures, and it doesn’t sound the same!
‘Jodrell Bank’ by Patric Dickinson starts
confrontationally, with echoes of the Old Testament God’s challenge to Job
‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?’5 The poem is somewhat anti-science, or at least directed
against the arrogance of scientists. Dickinson feels that science has blown our
comfortable world apart, destroyed our myths, and, in presenting ‘spaces beyond
the span I Of our myths’, revealed our loneliness for what it is.6
In certain ways his poem continues a note heard sometimes in Victorian poetry
where astronomy could be seen as what Tennyson called one of the ‘Terrible
Muses’, but other more recent poets have sensed an excitement in the science
and its revelations.7 The radio astronomy theme is continued by
Adrienne Rich in her ‘Planetarium’. This poem has the lengthy subtitle
‘Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), astronomer, sister of William; and
others’, and I have to declare an interest, since I suspect that as the female
radio astronomer who discovered pulsars I might be one of the ‘others’. This
poem was apparently written in 1968, the year the discovery of pulsars was
announced, so it was based on very topical material. It is said to have been
written following a visit to a planetarium, hence the title.
Heartbeat of the pulsar Heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yet I
stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of
signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the
universe ... I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate
pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the
mind.8
There is a progression through the poem from the first two
lines, ‘A woman in the shape of a monster I a monster in the shape of a woman’
to ‘an instrument in the shape of a woman’, and from ‘a woman’ and ‘she’ to
‘I’. It moves from holding at a distance women doing unusual or peculiar things
like science (monsters) to affirming them at the end; arguably it moves from a
male perspective to a female one. Given the author’s feminist track record, one
half expects this; however, 1968 was early in the feminist movement, even in
the USA.
Linking Caroline Herschel
with a monster has other resonances for me. I was one of several female
astronomers trying to ensure that at least one female was included in a series
of lectures about famous astronomers; we proposed Caroline Herschel. We lost
the argument, on that occasion, because it was judged the only surviving
picture of her was not flattering—she looked ugly! I would agree; it is not a
flattering picture. As a young girl she had been told by her father that since
she was not pretty and the family was not rich, she should not expect to marry
and should resign herself to being housekeeper to one of her brothers. A woman
of lesser character would have curled up and died. She became housekeeper to
her brother William. On nights when he was away on business and she was left on
her own, she used a telescope he had given her to search the sky for comets,
discovering eight in total! Living at a time when women were not always
recognized, she was eclipsed by the male astronomers in her family, her brother
William, and his son John.
She has been rehabilitated in recent years, and
is being written back into history, as well as into verse. I am reassured that
this process is an ongoing one, for not only is there Adrienne Rich’s poem
about Caroline Herschel, Jennifer Clement has a recent one too, ‘William
Herschel’s Sister, Caroline, Discovers Eight Comets’. Adrienne Rich implies
that the body senses the signals from space; Jennifer Clement is more direct:
‘I feel the dust tails I hear them rustle I in my fringed sleeves.’9 More humorously, as we shall soon note, Michael Longley
picks up similar vibrations in his poem ‘Halley’s comet’.
At least since Sappho and Hesiod poets have
responded to the stars, but there are two astronomical phenomena which are so
spectacular that they will grab even the modern, academic astrophysicists and
get them out there, under the sky, looking upwards. These phenomena are comets
(well, some of them!), and total eclipses of the Sun. Only if one can travel
each time to that small patch of the earth where there will be totality does
one see many total solar eclipses; for most of us they are rarely or never
experienced. So, not surprisingly, there are few poems about eclipses; however,
Simon Armitage has written a complete poetic drama, ‘Eclipse’, set in Cornwall
at the time of the 1999 solar eclipse.10
Comets are more widely seen, and can be
wonderfully spectacular; they have found their way into contemporary poetry.
Halley’s comet is a periodic comet, returning every seventy-six
years, and is the subject of several poems. Its 1910 apparition was remarkable
and remembered by many. Its 1986 apparition, especially for those of us in the
northern hemisphere, was extremely disappointing. As Sheenagh Pugh puts it in
‘The Comet-Watcher’s Perspective’, ‘look as he might, it was just a blue
smudge.’11
The poor show in 1986 to a degree wrong-footed
people like the poet Kenneth Rexroth who, having seen ‘that long-haired star’,
the glorious comet in 1910 (when Rexroth was aged five), pictures its next
return. But whether it actually happened like that or not, his description of
a great comet, ‘its plume over water I Dribbling on the liquid night’, is
magnificent. At the same time he confronts his own mortality (the theme is
similar to that in Hardy’s ‘The Comet at Yell’ham’) and there is an interesting
mix of the cosmic perpetual and the human temporal. Rexroth’s poem is addressed
to his children, and by having children he is saved the full agony of his own death
and can ponder the continuation of the human race as ‘vessels’ of a ‘billion-
year-long I River’.12 Where Patric Dickinson sees astronomy as destroying
myths, and so as threatening, Rexroth regards it as consonant with great
rhythms of the universe which scientists, poets, and all humans may sense, and
in which they participate.
Stanley Kunitz, born the same year as Kenneth
Rexroth, lived long enough to see both apparitions of Halley’s comet, and after
the second wrote a charming poem recalling the first. In his ‘Halley’s Comet’
he recalls his boyhood self attending both to his first-grade schoolteacher,
Mrs Murphy, writing the words ‘Halley’s Comet’ in chalk on a blackboard, and to
her saying that if the comet strayed off course it might smash into the earth;
this memory is juxtaposed with the words of a wild preacher who urged the
schoolchildren to repent. Kunitz’s poem concludes with the boy stealing in
secret on to the roof of his parents’ house, ‘searching the starry sky, I
waiting for the world to end’.13 Again a wonderful picture is
drawn—one can just see it happening, and we are reminded of similar ‘preachers’
who flourished before recent cometary appearances. The poem’s whimsical charm
fades into sterner stuff in the last few lines when he addresses his dead
father, hoping that the father can see the son on the rooftop. It is
interesting that Stanley Kunitz, who must have been in his eighties when he
wrote this poem, can recall or maybe even still feels the loss (through
suicide) of his father at an early age. On the other hand,
if one really did believe the world was about to end, a missing father would be
more strongly missed. Mother apparently is no use in these circumstances.
Observing what she poignantly calls the
‘only-coming-once’ of comet Hale-Bopp and drawing lessons for us all from its
coming and its going, the poet Gwyneth Lewis writes of how ‘It’s no accident
that leave I fails but still tries to rhyme
with love’.14 These words are from her ‘Zero Gravity: A Space Requiem’,
written in 1997 while her sister- in-law was dying of cancer and an astronaut
cousin was launching into space. This is the kind of juxtaposition that life
sometimes sends us, and she rises to the challenge. The poem melds life and
love, death and loss, comets and space flight, with a particularly good
interplay between the human and the astronomical. In contrast to some other
authors, Lewis is drawing upon the transitory nature of the comet. Entitled
‘Zero Gravity’, her poem nonetheless possesses a gravitas,
as indicated by the word ‘requiem’ in its subtitle. Lighter, more beautifully
featherlike, is Michael Longley’s ‘Halley’s Comet’. This poem is subtitled
‘Homage to Erik Satie’, but perhaps ‘Teasing Erik Satie’ would be nearer the
mark! In a poem whose speaker gets drunk, the lines about how ‘inside my left
nostril I A hair kept buzzing with signals from Halley’s comet’ give a surreal
feel, and one is far from convinced that nothing similar will happen ‘for another
seventy-six years’!15
Longley’s is a clever, tantalizing piece of
writing, with some of the lovely imagery characteristic of this poet. Its light
tone may make it relatively unusual among poems dealing with astronomy. Pascal
was speaking for many when he said, ‘The eternal silence of these infinite
spaces frightens me’.16 Part of this
unhappiness comes from an appreciation of how small and insignificant we humans
are. Some are depressed by this thought; others look at how large the universe
is and are thrilled. William Empson’s ‘Letter I’ not only quotes part of
Pascal’s statement—‘The eternal silence of the infinite spaces’—but also
captures some of Pascal’s general discomfort. In part this is through the
incompleteness of the truncated Pascal quotation, but it is also through the
structure of the poem with its uncomfortable seven-line stanzas, the dangling
incompleteness of the Pascal quotation emphasized by a clear rhyme pattern
that rhymes ‘spaces’ with ‘pointless places’ and sees ‘galaxies’ as ‘void’.17 A sense of anxiety and discomfort is again present in Leo
Aylen’s poem ‘Orbiting Pluto’, which addresses several of the issues around
space travel. In ‘Orbiting Pluto’ we hear the voice of one of the first humans
to leave our Solar System for another star and its planet. At the point of
writing they have reached Pluto, which represents the edge of the known world.
Pluto, in ‘this last I Beyond of all beyonds’, cannot be described as homely,
but compared with the long, black, empty coldness ahead it is.18
The poet calls on classical imagery of Charon, ferryman of the river Lethe, and
of the journey to the underworld to articulate how the space travellers in
frozen sleep go over the rim of the known universe into the ‘private
consciousness’ of the beyond. Our fears, our discomfort, our anxieties about
the cosmos seem in recent years to have been focused in the poetry about space
travel. Iain Crichton Smith’s ‘The Space-Ship’, with its tenor of death and
blackness, is another example.19 Perhaps the focus is thus because
with space flight we are now entering into that cosmos (although our
penetration is a mere hair’s breadth). More scary and more significant, to me,
is the future of our planet and the future of our universe. Are we seeing here
poetry driven by the personal, the local, and the immediate, rather than
engaging with what the scientific subject is telling us? Or is it just that the
big picture is too big?
I was putting the finishing touches to this
section when news of the 2003 Columbia Space Shuttle accident broke. Have we
become too confident, too familiar with space flight? Is the ominous note
struck by several of the authors quoted here justified? Rebecca Elson seems to
have the right words for this occasion in her poem ‘When You Wish upon a Star’
with its troubled yet lyrical imagery of stellar lights juxtaposed with space
debris, ‘a lost screw I Losing height, I Incandescent for an instant’.20
The setting of such a tiny detail against the hugeness of space is quickening,
but also frightening.
One thing we now know better than ever is that
the sheer size of the universe is both startling and incomprehensible. That it
is expanding, and maybe even accelerating in its expansion, makes it no easier.
That we cannot directly see at least 95 per cent of it (the dark matter) leaves
us floundering. That we, human beings, are made from the stuff of star death,
means we cannot ignore it—in an intimate and ultimate way we too are stars.
That its future is hostile to life and will eventually wipe us out, makes us
want to ignore it; largeness and largess do not seem to go together. How do
poets handle these issues? My impression is that North American authors are
more willing to engage than British. This could be for one
of several reasons: there are more of them, giving the impression of greater
engagement; NASA is conspicuously better at publicity than are the British, so
North Americans are more aware of astronomical developments (although it has
to be said that NASA publicity crosses the Atlantic); we are less sympathetic,
more hostile towards science; and the pragmatic reason—US authors use the World
Wide Web more, and hence perhaps more of their poems have come more to my
attention!
Who are the main players? The American poet
Antler, in ‘On learning that on the clearest night only 6000 stars are visible
to the naked eye’ approaches the big questions in an amusing, almost flippant
way, but keeps his feet on the ground and holds the reader well. His concern is
entirely with the effect on the individual of the attempt at comprehension of
an unpunctuated blur of ‘stars galaxies universes I pastpresentfuture’. Though
he uses playfully the language of percentage, suggesting that if scientists
claim we use only ten percent of our brains’ potential, then that ten percent
is ignorant of ninety-nine per cent of the universe, his conclusion may be
comfortingly, evasively human with its suggestion that perhaps a wine flask
under the deep night sky can be ‘more powerful I than the largest telescope’.21
The universe is so large that light takes an
appreciable time to travel across it, and starlight seen tonight may have
started its journey tens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years
previously. Louis MacNeice and Elizabeth Jennings both have poems about this,
but the two poems are very different in feel. The latter part of MacNeice’s
‘Star-gazer’ speculates on the long years taken by light to travel to a human
perceiver. Light may take longer to travel than even the lifetime of the human
species, so that, by the time some light reaches earth there may be no one left
alive ‘To run from side to side in a late night train I Admiring it and adding
noughts in vain.’22 Elizabeth
Jennings’s ‘Delay’ treats of a similar theme with its alignment of love that
may be perceived only after ‘Its first desire is spent’ with the light of a
star that shines years back and takes years to arrive, its ‘impulse’ waiting
‘for eyes to claim it beautiful’.23 When I include
Jennings’s poem in a public lecture on astronomy, it draws from the audience a
gentle, appreciative ‘mmmh’—that involuntary note of recognition that is the
sound of a poem striking home! It is a much more effective poem than MacNeice’s
because it is shorter, using fewer, well-chosen words. In MacNeice’s poem the
profusion of words befuddles the reader—they trip each other up. Elizabeth
Jennings has good interplay between the cosmic and the personal, but
nonetheless it is the personal element—not least in its last line, ‘And love
arrived may find us somewhere else’—that is ascendant. Once again the cosmic is
used as the vehicle for the personal.
Poetry often articulates personal emotion, but rarely is it
able to ‘keep up’ with modern astrophysics. Astronomy has moved a long way in
the past fifty years. There has been the move in the profession away from
stargazer to astrophysicist. This is well articulated by Robert Francis in his
poem ‘Astronomer’. Here the poet situates the figure of his title ‘Far far I
Beyond the stargazer’ in a condition where he ‘goes out of his mind’ in pursuit
of a ‘Beyond’ which has both scientific and spiritual overtones. Alluding
perhaps to ‘the peace that passes understanding’, yet restating that in a
scientific context, Francis’s poem takes its astronomer to a zone where,
strangely going beyond himself, he exists
Where no comfort is
And this
His comfort is
His irreducible peace.24
There are many poems which use astronomical topics as a
novel way of illustrating or illuminating human dilemmas but there are few, I
feel, that really engage with modern astrophysics. In this respect I am
disappointed, for should not poetry engage with the wider world? And does that
not include our understanding about the birth and life and death of the universe?
The last few poems quoted here are ones that do seem to me to make this
engagement; they are in a sense a connoisseur’s choice, and may not have much
appeal to those unfamiliar with the astrophysics. I appreciate them; it feels
good to see one’s professional area of work recognized, comprehended, and
honoured by being set forth like this.
John Haines in his ‘A Little Cosmic Dust Poem’
captures beautifully, and with scientific accuracy, how star death and the
chemical elements produced thereby become new stars and human life. Writing of
the rain of particles produced by the debris of dying stars, he sets out how ‘In the radiant field of Orion’ new and huge
hordes of stars are forming, and finds emerging from ‘the cold and fleeing
dust’ of the cosmos a renewed sense of individual human identity in ‘my voice,
your face, this love’.25 Similarly,
Pattiann Rogers demonstrates a good technical understanding of the nature of
the expansion of the universe and couches it in some lovely images in her ‘Life
in an Expanding Universe’ with its ‘cosmic I pinwheels’ expelling matter and
light as if they were ‘fields of dandelions’ in a summer wind, ‘creating new
distances I simply by soaring into them.’26 John Sokol also contemplates the expanding
universe in his ‘Thoughts near the Close of Millennium’, and handles well the
conundrum that the explosion which produced the expansion was ‘everywhere’ and
had ‘no centre’. Moving jazzily from Dizzy Gillespie to ‘the furthest quasar’
the poem punningly mingles loved day-to-day routines with awe, and scientific
with colloquial vocabulary as ‘We’re forever blown away by that first Big
Bang’.27
Entropy and the heat death of the universe have
been written about by several poets. John Updike’s ‘Ode to entropy’ is probably
the best known, but, contrasting with Updike’s more external approach, Neil
Rollinson (‘Entropy’) has a domestic one as he writes of how, as he watches an
ice-cube melting into his glass of wine ‘the heat of the Chardonnay passing
into the ice I . . . means the universe is dying’ and links this to a lover’s
‘dress that only this morning I was warm to my touch’.28
The amount of dark matter in the universe determines its
future. It is not yet known what form the dark matter takes (there may be
several components) but the quantity fixes the amount of gravity in the
universe and hence the nature of the expansion. Rebecca Elson’s research was
into dark matter. I give her the last word, for she handles the biggest of
issues in a wonderful way. How sad she died so young—I would have liked more of
her work. Here she is with ‘Let there Always be Light (Searching for Dark
Matter)’.
For this we go out dark nights, searching For the
dimmest stars,
For signs of unseen things:
To weigh us
down.
To stop the
universe From rushing on and on
Into its own beyond
Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,
Its last star
going out.
Whatever they turn out to be,
Let there be swarms of them,
Enough for immortality,
Always a star
where we can warm ourselves.
Let there be enough to bring it back From its own
edges,
To bring us all so close that we ignite The bright
spark of resurrection.29
NOTES:
1. Frederick Seidel, ‘The New Cosmology’, in K. Brown
(ed.), Verse and Universe (Minneapolis:
Milkweed Editions, 1998), 23.
2.
Diane Ackerman, Jaguar of
Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 1991), 7.
3. Diane Ackerman, The
Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (New York: Morrow,
1976).
4.
Miroslav Holub, Selected
Poems, trans. Ian Milner and George Theiner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967),
47.
5. Job 38.4 (Revised
English Bible).
6.
Patric Dickinson, ‘Jodrell Bank’, in N. Albery (ed.), Poem for
the Day (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), 377.
7.
Alfred (Lord) Tennyson, Tennyson
Poems and Plays, ed. T. Herbert Warren (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 810.
8.
Adrienne Rich, Collected
Early Poems 1950-19/0 (New York: Norton, 1993), 361.
9.
Jennifer Clement, ‘William Herchel’s Sister, Caroline,
Discovers Eight Comets’, in K. Brown (ed.), Verse and
Universe (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1998), 301.
10. Simon Armitage, CloudCuckooLand (London: Faber and
Faber, 1997), 113.
11. Sheenagh Pugh, Stonelight (Bridgend: Seren Books,
1999), 57.
12.
Kenneth Rexroth, The
Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New
Directions, 1966), 237.
13.
Stanley Kunitz, The
Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (New York: Norton, 1966), 256.
14. Gwyneth Lewis, Zero
Gravity (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1998), 23.
15.
Michael Longley, ‘Halley’s Comet’, in A. Motion (ed.), Here to
Eternity (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 364.
16.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees sur
la Religion, trans. W. F. Trotter (New
York: Collier, 1909-14), part 3, 206.
17. William Empson, Collected
Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 19.
18.
Leo Aylen, Dancing the
Impossible: New and Selected Poems (Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press,
1997), 142.
19. Iain Crichton Smith,
Love Poems and Elegies (London: Gollancz,
1972), 17.
20. Rebecca Elson, A Responsibility
to Awe (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), 11.
21.
Antler, ‘A second before it bursts’, in K. Brown (ed.),
Verse and Universe (Minneapolis:
Milkweed Editions, 1998), 42.
22. Louis MacNeice, Selected
Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 158.
23.
Elizabeth Jennings, New
Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 1.
24.
Robert Francis, ‘Astronomer’, in K. Brown (ed.), Verse and
Universe (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1998), 26.
25.
John Haines, in Timothy Ferris (ed.), The World
Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1991), 770.
26.
Pattiann Rogers, in K. Brown (ed.), Verse and
Universe (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1998), 49.
27.
John Sokol, in K. Brown (ed.), Verse and
Universe (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1998), 258.
28.
Neil Rollinson, in M. Riordan and J. Turney (eds.), A Quark for
Mister Mark (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 41; see also John
Updike, Facing Nature: Poems (London: Andre
Deutsch, 1986), 86.
29. Elson, A Responsibility
to
Awe, 14.
In: Contemporary poetry and contemporary science. Edited b Robert Crawford. Oxford, 2006, p.125-140.
