When Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton formulated the fundamental rules that underlie everything in the physical world, they changed much more than the face of science. For some, they gave humanity the courage to let go of old superstitions and see the world as rational and manageable; for others, they upset comforting, ordered ways that had served humanity for centuries, leaving only a dry, “mechanical clockwork” universe in their wake.
Poets of the time reacted to such changes in their work and debated whether the new world picture was an appealing or frightening one. John Donne (1573–1631), in a poem called “Anatomy of the World,” laments the passing of the old certainties:
The new Philosophy [science] calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
(Here the “element of fire” refers also to the sphere of fire, which medieval thought placed between Earth and the Moon.)
By the next century, however, poets like Alexander Pope were celebrating Newton and the Newtonian world view. Pope’s famous couplet, written upon Newton’s death, goes
Nature, and nature’s laws lay hid in night.
God said, Let Newton be! And all was light.
In his 1733 poem, An Essay on Man, Pope delights in the complexity of the new views of the world, incomplete though they are:
Of man, what see we, but his station here,
From which to reason, to which refer? . . .
He, who thro’ vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What vary’d being peoples every star,
May tell why Heav’n has made us as we are . . .
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, in spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
Poets and philosophers continued to debate whether humanity was exalted or debased by the new views of science. The nineteenth-century poet Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) cries out in his poem “The New Sinai”:
And as old from Sinai’s top God said that God is one,
By science strict so speaks He now to tell us, there is None!
Earth goes by chemic forces; Heaven’s a Mécanique Celeste!
And heart and mind of humankind a watchwork as the rest!
(A “mécanique celeste” is a clockwork model to demonstrate celestial motions.)
The twentieth-century poet Robinson Jeffers (whose brother was an astronomer) saw it differently in a poem called “Star Swirls”:
There is nothing like astronomy to pull the stuff out of man.
His stupid dreams and red-rooster importance:
Let him count the star-swirls.
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