At the Arts ⁄ Science Interface
- ENGINEERS’ CORNER
- CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of the TRIPLE KIND.
- OUT of AFRICA … THE STORY of YOU…
- ARTS/SCIENCE ‘ENCOUNTERS’: a Review
- ARTSCIENCE: first look-ahead to 2010
- Upon a Peak in Darien… New Vistas from Old Places
- CP Snow: Only Connect
- Whose Rise and Fall …?
- How Many Cultures? CP Snow and the Darwin Legacy
- Creative Break-Through at Sheffield University
The Ideas Exchange
What You've Been Saying
The Ideas Exchange
What Others Have Said
The PEST Anthology
- YET MORE PEST POEMS
- More ‘PEST’ Poems
- PEST Inaugural
- A Work in Progress: Poetry of Science and Technology
The CVN Archive
About This Blog
YET MORE PEST POEMS
From ‘The Temple of Nature’
Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These,as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.
Erasmus Darwin (1732-1802)
(Grandfather of Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin’s ‘The Temple of Nature’
“ anticipated the outline of his grandson’s theory by half a century” (Ashton Nichols, ‘Romantic Natural Histories’)
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From ‘Darwin A Life in Poems’…..
“More Funny Ideas About Grandeur “….
…’Out of famine, death and struggle for existence,
comes the most exalted end
we’re capable of conceiving: creation
of the higher animals!
Our first impulse is to disbelieve-
how could any secondary law
produce organic beings, infinitely numerous,
characterised by most exquisite
workmanship and adaptation?
Easier to say, a Creator designed each.
But there is a simple grandeur in this view –
that life, with its power to grow, to reach, feel,
reproduce, diverge, was breathed
into matter in a few forms first
and maybe only one. To say that while this planet
has gone cycling on
according to fixed laws of gravity,
from so simple an origin, through selection
of infinitesimal varieties, endless forms
most beautiful and wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved.’
Ruth Padel
‘ Ruth Padel’s remarkable memoir of her great-great-grandfather is a sequence of exquisite, precise and moving poems. Once I had started reading I could not put it down until I had reached the end’ Claire Tomalin.( Nor I – Ed)
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Bumblebees and the Scientific Method
A scientist, a man of parts,
(some of which worked, in fits and starts),
by using certain apparatus
proved bees could not be aviators.
There was no doubt, declared our hero,
the fundamental laws of aero-
nautics, - dynamics and whatever
must soon convince the unbeliever
that bees were built to such a model,
they scarcely could do more than waddle.
The ratio of their body weight
to wing-span, he could demonstrate,
precluded take-off, much less flight.
Colleagues allowed his sums were right:
Professors, Fellows, Doctors, Tutors,
sweating away at their computers,
confirmed our man’s results in toto,
and grudgingly agreed to go to
honour his triumph at a party,
(nobody really loves a smarty).
While all acclaimed his theories,
nobody thought to tell the bees,
who, never having been to college,
nor stayed abreast of modern knowledge,
kept up a stunning imitation
of wing-powered aerial navigation
Sheena Pugh
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From Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Close your eyes to make
it large, larger, largest. Someone can see it
and put it on film, so like a picture, so like an echo
attracting and repelling across what you can only
imagine as noise in a vast cathedral dome, knocking
for a door, logged in your head, wordless……
(In hospital for a scan, Jon Glover became fascinated by the ways in which Magnetic Resonance Imaging creates pictures of the hidden processes of the nervous system. It could express what is already written within the human body, in all organic life and the earth itself. Whether in the hospital scanner or the vast particle accelerators exploring the fabric of the universe in laboratories deep underground in Geneva, the process of making atoms collide to reveal new meanings tells a story, written in the brain, on the walls of a cave, in a poem..)
Cern: frontiers, gravediggers
Like the infinitely splitting particles, circling
to destruction between Switzerland and France.
Why bother with them? It seems I’m digging
them out for the sake of it. Sick. Really sick.
It’s as if particles from wartime corpses
might have seeped home in the soil from Verdun,
to either side, pining for an explanation,
or a chance to rest, or to forget what
they once were by becoming quite invisible.
Does anything verbal stack up the voltage
for such bright light? It could be a holding
charge, static, while waiting to see if the
rotting matter can be read out loud
in the form of a script to make a plea,
or warm an electric coil to switch off
the guilt, since you’re not immune from that now.
Press. Pass it on. It works as long as you
can’t see it. Close your eyes and listen
to the document in your head. There now.
Buy. It trickles through in no time at all.
Jon Glover
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Leonardo and the Vortex
Poems 1988-98 Jo Shapcott
I get like him sometimes:
seeing the same shape in everything
I look at, the same tones
in everything I hear.
But I’ll never make a deluge drawing
or be gripped by the science of circular
motion. And I probably won’t learn to care how
many complex collisions happen in a pool
when water is trickled from above.
How many currents percuss against each other,
and how waves rebound into the air, falling
again to splash up more water in smaller
and smaller versions of the same.
How a storm is different where air and water mix,
bursting again and again through the thin skin
which separates them. How a woman’s hair
moves in spouts and spirals just like water
and how the leaves of the star plant
trail on the ground in a loose coil.
And look at your sleeve, folding and swirling
around your arm, and the pattern of fine black hairs
curving from inner wrist to outer elbow,
and the underlying muscles relying on that slight
twist around the lower arm for their strength,
and the blood coiling around your body
through the little eddies in the larger veins
and arteries, coiling towards the vortex
in the chambers of your heart where I sit,
where the impetus has pulled me in.
Jo Shapcott
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what if a much of a which of a wind
what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer’s lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
-when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man
what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
-whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it’s they shall cry hello to the spring
what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn’t:blow death to was)
-all nothing’s only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live
ee cummings
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Engineers’ Corner
We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints –
That’s why so many poets end up rich.
While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets
Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch?
Whereas the person who can write a sonnet
Has got it made. It’s always been the way,
For everybody knows that we need poems
And everybody reads them every day.
Yes, life is hard if you choose engineering –
You’re sure to need another job as well;
You’ll have to plan your projects in the evenings
Instead of going out, it must be hell.
While well-heeled poets ride around in Daimlers,
You’ll burn the midnight oil to earn a crust.
With no hope of a statue in the Abbey,
With no hope, even, of a modest bust.
No wonder small boys dream of writing couplets
And spurn the bike, the lorry and the train.
There’s far too much encouragement for poets –
That’s why this country’s going down the drain.
Wendy Cope
( Occasioned by an Engineering Council Advertisement.’Why isn’t
there an Engineers’ Corner in Westminster Abbey? In Britain we’ve
always made more fuss of a ballad than a blueprint’)
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“Arcturus” is his other name
“Arcturus” is his other name—
I’d rather call him “Star.”
It’s very mean of Science
To go and interfere!
I pull a flower from the woods—
A monster with a glass
Computes the stamens in a breath—
And has her in a “class”!
Whereas I took the Butterfly
Aforetime in my hat—
He sits erect in “Cabinets”—
The Clover bells forgot.
What once was “Heaven”
Is “Zenith” now—
Where I proposed to go
When Time’s brief masquerade was done
Is mapped and charted too.
What if the poles should frisk about
And stand upon their heads!
I hope I’m ready for “the worst”—
Whatever prank betides!
Perhaps the “Kingdom of Heaven’s” changed—
I hope the “Children” there
Won’t be ‘new fashioned’ when I come
And laugh at me—and stare—
I hope the Father in the skies
Will lift his little girl—
Old fashioned—naught—everything—
Over the stile of “Pearl.”
Emily Dickinson
1830-1886
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