Science and Poetry

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars--mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere.' I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. [...] What is the pattern, or the meaning, or why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

~Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p. 59

This is why I have seldom cared for nature-contemplation poetry. Not that I know terribly much of anything about science -- but what I do know is still more than most poems bother to acknowledge, even those that should know better.

It's also why Annie Dillard floored me, when my sister handed me the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (also here) last summer.

"A rosy, complex light fills my kitchen at the end of these lengthening June days. From an explosion on a nearby star eight minutes ago, the light zips through space, particle-wave, strikes the planet, angles on the continent, and filters through a mesh of land dust: clay bits, sod bits, tiny windborne insects, bacteria, shred of wing and leg, gravel dust, grits of carbon, and dried cells of grass, bark, and leaves. [...] The light crosses the valley, threads through the screen on my open kitchen window, and gilds the painted wall. A plank of brightness bends from the wall and extends over the goldfish bowl on the table where I sit. The goldfish's side catches the light and bats it my way; I've an eyeful of fish scale and star." (124-125)

"A whirling air in his swim bladder balances the goldfish's weight in the water; his scales overlap, his feathery gills pump and filter; his eyes work, his heart beats, his liver absorbs, his muscles contract in a wave of extending ripples. The daphnieas he eats have eyes and jointed legs. The algae the daphnieas eat have green cells stacked like checkers or winding in narrow ribbons like spiral staircases up long columns of emptiness. And so on diminishingly down. We have not yet found the dot so small it is uncreated, as it were, like a metal blank, or merely roughed in--and we never shall. We go down landscape after mobile, sculpture after collage, down to molecular structures like a mob dance in Bureghel, down to atoms airy and balanced as a canvas by Klee, down to atomic particles, the heart of the matter, as spirited and wild as any El Greco saints. And it all works." (128)

~Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Chapter 8

(The next chapter is all about death, for the record. Her smashing of any rose-colored glasses is another reason I liked the book).

And I think if anyone is going to write poetry about nature, or Emersonian musings about nature today -- this is probably how they need to write. If nature-based poetry is actually going to wake people up, and grab their attention, this is what it will have to look like. We know -- or at least I know -- too much to be content with dancing golden daffodils and red red roses and purple sunsets. To do less than that, to repeat surface banalities, to pretend we don't know what we now know...it feels false and forced, playing pretend and walking with our ears muffled, in a creation that is far stranger and far grander.