Birds and Poets : with Other Papers

by John Burroughs

It needs but a little pondering to see that the great poet of the future will not be afraid of science, but will rather seek to plant his feet upon it as upon a rock. He knows that, from an enlarged point of view, there is no feud between Science and Poesy, any more than there is between Science and Religion, or between Science and Life. He sees that the poet and the scientist do not travel opposite but parallel roads, that often approach each other very closely, if they do not at times actually join. The poet will always pause when he finds himself in opposition to science; and the scientist is never more worthy the name than when he escapes from analysis into synthesis, and gives us living wholes. And science, in its present bold and receptive mood, may be said to be eminently creative, and to have made every first-class thinker and every large worker in any aesthetic or spiritual field immeasurably its debtor. It has dispelled many illusions, but it has more than compensated the imagination by the unbounded vistas it has opened up on every hand. It has added to our knowledge, but it has added to our ignorance in the same measure: the large circle of light only reveals the larger circle of darkness that encompasses it, and life and being and the orbs are enveloped in a greater mystery to the poet to-day than they were in the times of Homer or Isaiah. Science, therefore, does not restrict the imagination, but often compels it to longer flights. The conception of the earth as an orb shooting like a midnight meteor through space, a brand cast by the burning sun with the fire at its heart still unquenched, the sun itself shooting and carrying the whole train of worlds with it, no one knows whither,—what a lift has science given the imagination in this field! Or the tremendous discovery of the correlation and conservation of forces, the identity and convertibility of heat and force and motion, and that no ounce of power is lost, but forever passed along, changing form but not essence, is a poetic discovery no less than a scientific one. The poets have always felt that it must be so, and, when the fact was authoritatively announced by science, every profound poetic mind must have felt a thrill of pleasure. Or the nebular hypothesis of the solar system,—it seems the conception of some inspired madman, like William Blake, rather than the cool conclusion of reason, and to carry its own justification, as great power always does. Indeed, our interest in astronomy and geology is essentially a poetic one,—the love of the marvelous, of the sublime, and of grand harmonies. The scientific conception of the sun is strikingly Dantesque, and appalls the imagination. Or the hell of fire through which the earth has passed, and the aeons of monsters from which its fair forms have emerged,—from which of the seven circles of the Inferno did the scientist get his hint? Indeed, science everywhere reveals a carnival of mightier gods than those that cut such fantastic tricks in the ancient world. Listen to Tyndall on light, or to Youmans on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see how fable pales its ineffectual fires, and the boldest dreams of the poets are eclipsed.

The vibratory theory of light and its identity with the laws of sound, the laws of the tides and the seasons, the wonders of the spectroscope, the theory of gravitation, of electricity, of chemical affinity, the deep beneath deep of the telescope, the world within world of the microscope,—in these and many other fields it is hard to tell whether it is the scientist or the poet we are listening to. What greater magic than that you can take a colorless ray of light, break it across a prism, and catch upon a screen all the divine hues of the rainbow?

In some respects science has but followed out and confirmed the dim foreshadowings of the human breast. Man in his simplicity has called the sun father and the earth mother. Science shows this to be no fiction, but a reality; that we are really children of the sun, and that every heart-beat, every pound of force we exert, is a solar emanation. The power with which you now move and breathe came from the sun just as literally as the bank-notes in your pocket came from the bank.

The ancients fabled the earth as resting upon the shoulders of Atlas, and Atlas as standing upon a turtle; but what the turtle stood upon was a puzzle. An acute person says that science has but changed the terms of the equation, but that the unknown quantity is the same as ever. The earth now rests upon the sun,—in his outstretched palm; the sun rests upon some other sun, and that upon some other; but what they all finally rest upon, who can tell? Well may Tennyson speak of the "fairy tales of science," and well may Walt Whitman say:—

"I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the
reasons of things;
They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen."

But, making all due acknowledgments to science, there is one danger attending it that the poet alone can save us from,—the danger that science, absorbed with its great problems, will forget Man. Hence the especial office of the poet with reference to science is to endow it with a human interest. The heart has been disenchanted by having disclosed to it blind, abstract forces where it had enthroned personal humanistic divinities. In the old time, man was the centre of the system; everything was interested in him, and took sides for or against him. There were nothing but men and gods in the universe. But in the results of science the world is more and more, and man is less and less. The poet must come to the rescue, and place man again at the top, magnify him, exalt him, reinforce him, and match these wonders from without with equal wonders from within. Welcome to the bard who is not appalled by the task, and who can readily assimilate and turn into human emotions these vast deductions of the savants! The minor poets do nothing in this direction; only men of the largest calibre and the most heroic fibre are adequate to the service. Hence one finds in Tennyson a vast deal more science than he would at first suspect; but it is under his feet; it is no longer science, but faith, or reverence, or poetic nutriment. It is in "Locksley Hall," "The Princess," "In Memoriam," "Maud," and in others of his poems. Here is a passage from "In Memoriam:"—

"They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread
"In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man;
"Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,
The herald of a higher race,
And of himself in higher place
If so he type this work of time
"Within himself, from more to more;
Or, crown'd with attributes of woe,
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore,
"But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom
"To shape and use. Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die."

Or in this stanza behold how the science is disguised or turned into the sweetest music:—

"Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow;
From fringes of the faded eve,
O happy planet, eastward go;
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister-world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below."

A recognition of the planetary system, and of the great fact that the earth moves eastward through the heavens, in a soft and tender love-song!