Know not the least things, which for our use be.
Why grass is green, or why our blood is red,
Are mysteries which none have reach'd unto.
John Donne, "On the progress of the soul"
How would John Donne react if he knew that his rhetorical questions about chlorophyll and hemoglobin, which he intended in a "when hell freezes over" sort of way, are actually now solved? Clearly, he believed that science and reason poison the soul; the take-home message from "On the progress of the soul" is that not only can't we know life's mysteries, but it isn't healthy to even try.
For hundreds of years, poets have written about science. Yet according to poet Maurice Riordan and science writer Jon Turney, authors of A quark for Mister Mark, poets have traditionally stuck with two age-old themes: our place in the universe and the nature of our origins. More recent topics have taken time to move from the bench to poets' brains.
Genetics is one topic that is starting to take prominence. At a recent London meeting about poetry and science held by the philanthropic organization Poet in the City, Michael Symmons Roberts read his science-inspired poetry. At times, he comes across as ambivalent; while he is clearly very interested in genetics, the words betray an edge of hostility. In his poem "Mapping the Genes," he likens the geneticist to a driver tearing through the desert in a "topless coupe," the helix "unravelled as vista / as vanishing point." The act takes the form of a cavalier desecration of nature.
Symmons Roberts' disapproval is made explicit in "To John Donne," a homage to Donne's erotic poem "To His Mistress Going to Bed." In the original poem, Donne compares undressing his lover to the discovery of America. But in Symmons Roberts' version, the lover finds his mistress has already been violated -- by geneticists: "[H]er body is already mapped," and "her breast's / curve has a patent." Symmons Robert's antipathy may be fuelled by conversations he has had with Nobel Laureate John Sulston, an outspoken critic of gene patenting. Yet the poet also seems to object to the act of knowing itself -- as if complete description kills the beauty of life. "It's all mapped -- there is no new landscape," he laments in "Mapping the genes."
Scientists occasionally cringe over some cases of "poetic license." When reciting his poem "The UV catastrophe," Riordan stated that Planck's constant is "precise, unlike pi" -- which had the epidemiologist next to me, Bill Hanage of London's Imperial College, bristling. He thought that much of the science/poetry relationship was one-sided and even parasitic. "Poets borrow language and ideas, but don't contribute to scientific understanding," he said.
But I believe that scientists can benefit from poetry: Aside from the aesthetic experience it can provide, poetry can make people more aware of scientific issues. More practically, scientists are indebted to a key poetic tool, metaphors, which pop up all over their language: think of immune "battles", cytokine "storms," cell "factories," and molecular "cascades."
At the London meeting held last month, poets, too, insisted that science is good for poetry, inasmuch as it continually provides new language and concepts for wordsmiths to play with.
So do poets and scientists have anything in common? As a former physicist who did his Ph.D. in optoelectrics, the poet Mario Petrucci ought to know. He told the audience that both practitioners "pay the world their full attention, and bear witness." He put it best, perhaps, when he joked, "Science and poetry is not a marriage - but they do exchange theoretical fluids."
Jennifer Rohn is a Research Fellow at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at University College London, and the editor of LabLit.com.
What can science do for poetry, and vice versa? Tell us here.
Jennifer Rohn
mail@the-scientist.com
Links within this article:
M. Riordan and J. Turney, A Quark For Mister Mark, October 2000.
http://www.amazon.com/Quark-Mister-Mark-Faber-Poetry/dp/0571205429
Poet in the City
http://www.poetinthecity.co.uk/
Michael Symmons Roberts
http://www.symmonsroberts.com
John Sulston as gene patenting critic
http://www.whoownsyourbody.org/sulston.html
Bill Hanage
http://www1.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/people/w.hanage/
M. Wenner, "The war against war metaphors," The Scientist, February 16, 2007.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/52851
Mario Petrucci
http://www.writersartists.net/petrucci.htm
MRC LMCB
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/LMCB
LabLit
http://www.lablit.com
[Comment posted 2007-08-23 06:27:05]
Um. I like science and poetry. I'm no good at either.
[Comment posted 2007-08-22 11:32:53]
[Comment posted 2007-08-21 07:54:11]
[Comment posted 2007-08-20 00:02:29]
[Comment posted 2007-08-19 22:39:27]
[Comment posted 2007-08-19 17:45:14]
As an aside, I obviously did not mean to imply that every last detail of green grass and red blood are completely understood, but surely we can agree that we have a pretty good idea of the basics. In contrast, it seems obvious from the context of the poem that Donne did not expect these particular mysteries to be even remotely understandable. Ever. (Other mysteries included in the poem are why blood pumps and what sputum is made of ? concepts also fairly well grasped by now.) I only alluded to this because I find it amazing to contemplate how far we have come since Donne's day, and find it hard to imagine how strange it would be to live in a world in which the simple scientific truths we take for granted now are simply a black box about which poets can only dream.
[Comment posted 2007-08-19 16:09:34]
I humbly submit that we all have multiple personalities that usually co-exist quite peacefully, because when one is engaged, the others are suspended.
One of these personalities may find pleasure in understanding the laws of optics that result in the formation of a rainbow, while a totally different personality of ours enjoys the beauty of the rainbow, without any concern for the scientific explanation behind its formation.
By the same token, it is a different personality of ours that deals with scientific issues, than the one that deals with poetry, or any other of the arts, or with physical activity, or with the tastes and aromas of different foods, etc.
Nonetheless, what each person finds engaging, important, exciting, pleasurable, beautiful, is inevitably affected by our culture, and experience.
Science is, however basically, different. Scientists are greatly disturbed when faced with a controversy between incommensurate paradigms in their own scientific field of expertise. But, in other areas, we learn to accept that our "own cup of tea" may not at all be "someone else's cup of tea".
[Comment posted 2007-08-19 06:02:48]
Not so. Donne was an enthusiast for the science of his day, and his poems are permeated with scientifc images--the pair of compasses, the discovery of America, the heliocentric universe. Unlike modern poets, he did notlook back to a rosy and non-existent golden age; he was totally au fait with the science going on around him.
Yours etc
Bryan Reuben
Professor emeritus of chemical technology
London South Bank University
reubenbg@LSBU.ac.uk
[Comment posted 2007-08-18 17:50:45]
Our most perceptive poets, like our wisest scientists, understand well what Albert Einstein said regarding the mystery of the Universe:
"Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.
- Albert Einstein, Response to atheist, Alfred Kerr (1927), quoted in The Diary of a Cosmopolitan (1971)
[Comment posted 2007-08-18 13:49:05]
The Right Brain thinks exactly the reverse.
Too bad that neither gets it, that poetry, merely terse,
May be wailing the loss of mystery & ambience
And grieving the illusion that in giving credence
To some factual stuff, the meaning-questions curse
The facts for seeming to make them worse
Than useless ? black ?n? white instead of ambivalence.
The anguish! That the luminous has been shed!
Poetry seeks reunion with the One:
The How of hemoglobin is not the Why of Red:
Receptive Green absorbs the Life of Sun
And mere Knowledge can never explain the Hearts Desire,
For Love, and Essence, and Liberty, Light, and Fire!
-- Kathy Downing, 8-18-07
[Comment posted 2007-08-18 12:56:17]
The greatest of our scientists have recognized that science ultimately cannot provide answers to these sorts of existential "why" questions. Newton acknowledged that, while he could describe how gravity works in his famous equations, he did not claim to know, ultimately, what gravitational attraction "is", or why it should exist as it does.
Nor am I convinced that John Donne believed that "not only can't we know life's mysteries...it isn't healthy to even try." Arguably, Donne was as interested in grappling with mysteries as any scientist (even though he worried, in the wake of Galileo's discoveries, that "[The] new Philosophy calls all in doubt / The Element of fire is quite put out" (The First Anniversary, 205-06). But, like the poet Emily Dickinson, Donne's poetry is aimed at heightening mysteries, not solving them [for an insightful essay on Dickinson and science, see Fred D. White's essay at LINK In one of his sonnets, Donne observes that, on the one hand, he is "a little world made cunningly Of elements" --but at the same time, "an angelic sprite." This is not an anti-scientific attitude; rather, it is an acknowledgment that, while both poets and scientists seek the truth, the greatest examplars in both fields know that ultimate "truth" may always remain a mystery--and that such truth as we may perceive is seen "through a glass darkly." --Ronald Pies MD
The author is a physician with the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center, and
the author of Creeping Thyme, a collection of poetry (Brandylane Publishing).
[Comment posted 2007-08-18 00:47:37]
Sul cuore delle terra
Traffita da un raggio di sole
Ed e subito sera
Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)
**********************************
Each one stands alone
On the heart of the Earth
Pierced through with a ray of sunlight
And it is suddenly night
Translated by Jack von Borstel
[Comment posted 2007-08-17 22:04:13]
[Comment posted 2007-08-17 21:11:11]
As a child, poetry first led me to appreciate those things that my immature mind could not comprehend. My later education showed me that these "things" were science. My lifelong passion will always be to meld the two. I truly believe that a scientist is a poet of sorts, whether that person appreciates it or not. Poetry is not so much about words as it is about speaking a person's passionate soul.
[Comment posted 2007-08-17 16:05:53]
LINK
[Comment posted 2007-08-17 11:59:49]
LINK