Tag: Sunday Poem

Sunday Science Poem: Melville and Mechanized War

When you think about poetry and the Civil War, Herman Melville is probably not the first person who comes to mind. Yet, with some serious hindsight, Melville has turned out to be one of the major poets of the Civil War. As readers of Moby Dick, White-Jacket, and “the Bell Tower” know, Melville had a longstanding interest in technology, science, and the mechanization of society. This made Melville especially attuned the effects of technology on war, and on the role of soldiers in war.

This week’s Sunday Science Poem is “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight.” The Monitor was the first Federal armored “ironclad” warship. On March 8, 1862, the Monitor and the Confederate Virginia (previously known as the Merrimac when it was a Federal ship) battled to a draw in the world’s first battle between armored warships – an ominous milestone that Melville explores in this poem. This was a battle of “no passion; all went by on crank, pivot, and screw, and calculations of caloric.” It was not a glorious fight of heroes, but a professional battle of technical “operatives.” Today, the operatives can control unmanned, mechanical weapons without even being present on the battlefield. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Melville and Mechanized War”

Sunday Science Poem: Mitochondrial Mothers

Despite my experiences of crushing boredom studying cell trafficking pathways in grad school, there was no way I was going to just walk past a book of poems titled Cell Traffic without stopping. In this delightful book, poet Heid E. Erdrich mixes themes of genetics, motherhood, ancestry, and Native American mythology to produce poetry that feels very relevant in a day when we can read information about our ancestry from the text of our DNA.

Today’s Sunday Poem is “Seven Mothers.” The title refers to the seven major, maternally inherited mitochondrial haplogroups popularized by Bryan Sykes in The Seven Daughters of Eve. Since Sykes’ book was published, we have developed a greater ability to use genetic variation in our nuclear DNA to trace our ancestry, and mitochondrial DNA now plays less of a role in our efforts to understand human ancestry than it once did. But it’s hard to beat the impact of mitochondrial maternal ancestry on our imaginations. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Mitochondrial Mothers”

Sunday Science Poem: Modernists and Darwin

Modernist writers and artists were heavily influenced by the remarkable series of heavily popularized, late 19th, early 20-th century scientific findings that can still stir controversy today. The work of Darwin and Einstein in particular, as well as the less scientific work of Freud contributed to the notion that human nature was not what it used to be. The mechanized mass slaughter of World War I appeared to verify the modern picture of humans as driven by unconscious drives and primordial animal urges.

T.S. Elliot’s poem “Sweeney Among The Nightingales” can be read as a disturbed response to Darwin. The main character, Apeneck Sweeney, “the silent vertebrate” is portrayed as an ape who eats ‘oranges bananas figs and hothouse grapes’ in a café while being hit on by prostitutes. Against these animal images Eliot placed allusions to and images from classical literature – a literature which, despite the rampant violence and depravity it depicts, portrays humans as noble and heroic.

 
Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees	
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,	
The zebra stripes along his jaw	
Swelling to maculate giraffe.	
 
The circles of the stormy moon	       
Slide westward toward the River Plate,	
Death and the Raven drift above	
And Sweeney guards the horned gate.	
 
Gloomy Orion and the Dog	
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;	        
The person in the Spanish cape	
Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees	
 
Slips and pulls the table cloth	
Overturns a coffee-cup,	
Reorganized upon the floor	        
She yawns and draws a stocking up;	
 
The silent man in mocha brown	
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;	
The waiter brings in oranges	
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;	        
 
The silent vertebrate in brown	
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;	
Rachel née Rabinovitch	
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;	
 
She and the lady in the cape	        
Are suspect, thought to be in league;	
Therefore the man with heavy eyes	
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,	
 
Leaves the room and reappears	
Outside the window, leaning in,	        
Branches of wistaria	
Circumscribe a golden grin;	
 
The host with someone indistinct	
Converses at the door apart,	
The nightingales are singing near	        
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,	
 
And sang within the bloody wood	
When Agamemnon cried aloud,	
And let their liquid droppings fall	
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

Sunday Science Poem – Nature’s Law

Inspired by this morning’s brunch of toad in the hole and baby bridies at St. Louis’ great Scotch bar, I’ve chosen Robert Burns’ “Nature’s Law” (1786) as this Sunday’s poem. The poem is about reproduction, and instead of God’s command to multiply and replenish the Earth, the drive to reproduce is here presented as Nature’s Law. Assigning the attributes of God to Nature (with a capital N, naturally) became a common tactic of the Romantics, who avoided traditional symbols of piety, as well as the hyper-rational Deism of Age of Enlightenment.

Recognizing “nature’s law” of reproduction is the first step towards Malthusian logic, the second step being the recognition of the consequences of unbridled reproduction. Malthus published his groundbreaking An essay on the principle of population twelve years after this poem, and of course Malthus’ writing was a direct influence on Darwin and his discovery of natural selection.

“Great Nature spoke: observant man obey’d” – Pope

Let other heroes boast their scars,
The marks of sturt and strife:
And other poets sing of wars,
The plagues of human life:

Shame fa’ the fun, wi’ sword and gun
To slap mankind like lumber!
I sing his name, and nobler fame,
Wha multiplies our number.

Great Nature spoke, with air benign,
“Go on, ye human race;
This lower world I you resign;
Be fruitful and increase.
The liquid fire of strong desire
I’ve pour’d it in each bosom;
Here, on this had, does Mankind stand,
And there is Beauty’s blossom.” Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem – Nature’s Law”

Sunday Poem: Imposing poses on nature

A poem on the difficulty of seeing and comprehending the world without metaphor or without “posing” its parts in our mental constructs, Wallace Stevens’ “Add This To Rhetoric”:

It is posed and it is posed
But in nature it merely grows.
Stones pose in the falling night;
And beggars dropping to sleep,
They pose themselves and their rags.
Shucks...lavender moonlight falls.
The building pose in the sky
And, as you paint, the clouds,
Grisaille, impearled, profound,
Pfft... In the way you speak
You arrange, the thing is posed,
What in nature merely grows.

To-morrow when the sun,
For all your images,
Comes up as the sun, bull fire,
Your images will have left
No shadow of themselves.
The poses of speech, of paint, 
Of music - Her body lies
Worn out, her arm falls down,
Her fingers touch the ground.
Above her, to the left,
A brush of white, the obscure,
The moon without a shape,
A fringed eye in a crypt.
The sense creates the pose.
In this it moves and speaks.
This is the figure and not
An evading metaphor.

Add this. It is to add.

The first two sentences of this poem lay out the theme, our struggle to understand what “merely grows” using the only tools we have available, mental constructs, within which we pose and pose again the parts of nature. It should go without saying (but I’ll say it anyway), that this applies to scientists as much as it applies to the poet. Continue reading “Sunday Poem: Imposing poses on nature”