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At It

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on November 18, 2010 by telescoper

Apologies for my posts being a bit thin on original content recently. There’s a lot going on at the moment and it has not been easy to find the time to write at any length. Before too long I hope to be able to get back into the swing of things and maybe even blog about science. Or even do some! In the meantime, however, I couldn’t resist passing on this poem called, At It, by R.S. Thomas. I’ve posted some of his verse on previous occasions, but I only found this one a few days ago and couldn’t resist sharing it, not least because it mentions Sir Arthur Eddington (probably in a reference to one of his popular science books).

I think he sits at that strange table
of Eddington’s. That is not a table
at all, but nodes and molecules
pushing against molecules
and nodes; and he writes there
in invisible handwriting the instructions
the genes follow. I imagine his
face that is more the face
of a clock, and the time told by it
is now, though Greece is referred
to and Egypt and empires
not yet begun.
+++++++++ And I would have
things to say to this God
at the judgement, storming at him,
as Job stormed with the eloquence
of the abused heart. But there will
be no judgement other than the verdict
of his calculations, that abstruse
geometry that proceeds eternally
in the silence beyond right and wrong.


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Autumn

Posted in Poetry with tags , on November 16, 2010 by telescoper

Walking to work through the cold fog of a Cardiff November morning, a vague recollection of this poem popped into my head from somwhere or other only to disappear when I made it into the office. It was foggy again on the way home, so I remembered the half-memory I had earlier on. I had a look around and found the poem that had been in and out of my head.

An autumn melancholy seems to have taken grip of many folk in the department, probably because it seems like there’s long dark tunnel until Christmas, never mind next Spring. I have to say I rather like the autumn, actually…

I SAW old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;–
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,
Pearling his coronet of golden corn.

Where are the songs of Summer?–With the sun,
Oping the dusky eyelids of the south,
Till shade and silence waken up as one,
And Morning sings with a warm odorous mouth.
Where are the merry birds?–Away, away,
On panting wings through the inclement skies,
Lest owls should prey
Undazzled at noonday,
And tear with horny beak their lustrous eyes.

Where are the blooms of Summer?–In the west,
Blushing their last to the last sunny hours,
When the mild Eve by sudden Night is prest
Like tearful Proserpine, snatch’d from her flow’rs
To a most gloomy breast.
Where is the pride of Summer,–the green prime,–
The many, many leaves all twinkling?–Three
On the moss’d elm; three on the naked lime
Trembling,–and one upon the old oak-tree!
Where is the Dryad’s immortality?–
Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew,
Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through
In the smooth holly’s green eternity.

The squirrel gloats on his accomplish’d hoard,
The ants have brimm’d their garners with ripe grain,
And honey bees have stored
The sweets of Summer in their luscious cells;
The swallows all have wing’d across the main;
But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,
And sighs her tearful spells
Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.
Alone, alone,
Upon a mossy stone,
She sits and reckons up the dead and gone
With the last leaves for a love-rosary,
Whilst all the wither’d world looks drearily,
Like a dim picture of the drowned past
In the hush’d mind’s mysterious far away,
Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last
Into that distance, gray upon the gray.

O go and sit with her, and be o’ershaded
Under the languid downfall of her hair:
She wears a coronal of flowers faded
Upon her forehead, and a face of care;–
There is enough of wither’d everywhere
To make her bower,–and enough of gloom;
There is enough of sadness to invite,
If only for the rose that died, whose doom
Is Beauty’s,–she that with the living bloom
Of conscious cheeks most beautifies the light:
There is enough of sorrowing, and quite
Enough of bitter fruits the earth doth bear,–
Enough of chilly droppings for her bowl;
Enough of fear and shadowy despair,
To frame her cloudy prison for the soul!

by Thomas Hood (1799-1845)


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To the Warmongers

Posted in History, Poetry, Politics with tags , , , on November 8, 2010 by telescoper

As we approach Remembrance Sunday (which this year lies on 14th November) I find myself once again wearing a poppy on my coat lapel, and having once again to explain this to those I meet in the department and elsewhere who don’t approve. I’ve already said everything I think I need to on this in posts last year and the year before, so I won’t repeat myself at length here.

I am aware (and acutely sensitive to) the danger that the wearing of a poppy might be mistaken for support for militarism and that many of our politicians would like to manipulate the meaning of this symbol in precisely that way for their own ends. Nevertheless, I will wear one and will observe the two minutes’ silence on Thursday too. Why? Lest we forget, that’s why…

But instead of debating this again, I will  post the following poem and letter, both of which were written by Siegfried Sassoon.

The poem is called the To the Warmongers:

I’m back again from hell
With loathsome thoughts to sell;
Secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.
Young faces bleared with blood,
Sucked down into the mud,
You shall hear things like this,
Till the tormented slain
Crawl round and once again,
With limbs that twist awry
Moan out their brutish pain,
As for the fighters pass them by.
For you our battles shine
With triumph half-divine;
And the glory of the dead
Kindles in each proud eye.
But a curse is on my head,
That shall not be unsaid,
And the wounds in my heart are red,
For I have watched them die.

The astonishing letter below was written by Siegfried Sassoon in July 1917, and was subsequently read out in the House of Commons. Sassoon narrowly escaped court martial for treason.

It’s worth noting the last two paragraphs:

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.

The tragedy is that these words could equally well have been written about Afghanistan 2010 rather than France or Belgium 1917. The sight of Tony Blair wearing a poppy at the Cenotaph is one that filled me with nausea, but his hypocrisy makes it more, not less, important to hang on to the true meaning. Lest we forget. Nowadays, though, I don’t really “wear my poppy with pride”, but with something rather closer to shame.


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A for Aphorisms?

Posted in Literature with tags , on November 3, 2010 by telescoper

I’m back again in Cardiff from a long day in Swindon, too tired to post anything substantial and indeed too tired to do anything much at all except make something to eat and slump in front of the football with a glass of wine (or two).

However, on the train coming home this evening I remembered something I’d promised to do last week, but which had slipped my mind. You may recall that I gave a talk in London last Wednesday evening. Well, before that, I had a glass of wine and a natter with one of the organisers of that event, a writer by the name of Robert Eddison. During the course of the conversation it emerged that he’s a prolific compiler of original aphorisms. In fact he has coined over 26,000 of these. The ones I saw were only a small part of the collection, but included such gems as

Things are best brought into the open behind closed doors

History, like photography, is all about perspective

You can’t have bare facts without the naked truth

and, my favourite because it’s a bit risqué,

It is during their salad days that most young matadors get tossed

It seemed to me that there was probably a ready market for a collection of pithy pensées, including speech writers, journalists, etc., but Robert explained that he was finding it difficult to find a publisher for them. I suggested setting up a sort of online repository for them. That’s been done already for famous examples, but surely there’s a demand for originally crafted ones?

Anyway, not being a publishing expert myself I hit on the idea of enlisting the help of my readers (both of them). If anyone has any suggestions about possible markets for 26,000 brand new sayings covering a huge range of topics in a witty and concise style or, better still, if you’re a publisher and you’re interested in them yourself, please let me have suggestions through the comments box and I’ll pass them onto to Robert on your behalf.


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Shadows in the Water

Posted in Poetry with tags , on November 2, 2010 by telescoper

Just back from a long day in Swindon, exhausted by the days STFC deliberations, and in need of an early night ahead of another 5am start tomorrow. Apologies then for not having a proper blog post. Here instead is another from my reserve collection of bits and bobs that I’ve been storing for a while. This poem is probably the most famous one by Thomas Traherne, who I’ve posted about before. I think Shadows in the Water is a marvellous mixture of childlike curiosity and deep philosophical reflection. I hope you like it.

In unexperienced infancy
Many a sweet mistake doth lie:
Mistake though false, intending true;
A seeming somewhat more than view;
That doth instruct the mind
In things that lie behind,
And many secrets to us show
Which afterwards we come to know.

Thus did I by the water’s brink
Another world beneath me think;
And while the lofty spacious skies
Reversèd there, abused mine eyes,
I fancied other feet
Came mine to touch or meet;
As by some puddle I did play
Another world within it lay.

Beneath the water people drowned,
Yet with another heaven crowned,
In spacious regions seemed to go
As freely moving to and fro:
In bright and open space
I saw their very face;
Eyes, hands, and feet they had like mine;
Another sun did with them shine.

‘Twas strange that people there should walk,
And yet I could not hear them talk:
That through a little watery chink,
Which one dry ox or horse might drink,
We other worlds should see,
Yet not admitted be;
And other confines there behold
Of light and darkness, heat and cold.

I called them oft, but called in vain;
No speeches we could entertain:
Yet did I there expect to find
Some other world, to please my mind.
I plainly saw by these
A new antipodes,
Whom, though they were so plainly seen,
A film kept off that stood between.

By walking men’s reversèd feet
I chanced another world to meet;
Though it did not to view exceed
A phantom, ’tis a world indeed;
Where skies beneath us shine,
And earth by art divine
Another face presents below,
Where people’s feet against ours go.

Within the regions of the air,
Compassed about with heavens fair,
Great tracts of land there may be found
Enriched with fields and fertile ground;
Where many numerous hosts
In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends
Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.

O ye that stand upon the brink,
Whom I so near me through the chink
With wonder see: what faces there,
Whose feet, whose bodies, do ye wear?
I my companions see
In you another me.
They seemèd others, but are we;
Our second selves these shadows be.

Look how far off those lower skies
Extend themselves! scarce with mine eyes
I can them reach. O ye my friends,
What secret borders on those ends?
Are lofty heavens hurled
‘Bout your inferior world?
Are yet the representatives
Of other peoples’ distant lives?

Of all the playmates which I knew
That here I do the image view
In other selves, what can it mean?
But that below the purling stream
Some unknown joys there be
Laid up in store for me;
To which I shall, when that thin skin
Is broken, be admitted in.


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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow..

Posted in Biographical, Literature with tags , on November 1, 2010 by telescoper

Gearing up for another stint in Swindon for the STFC Astronomy Grants Panel this week, I was trying to think of an appropriate theme for a blog post. The following short soliloquy from Macbeth somehow came up in a conversation in the pub last week, so I thought I’d post it here.

We actually “did” Macbeth at school and I was lucky enough to be cast in the best part, Lady Macbeth. No jokes please. I went to an all-boys school and, anyway, in Shakespeare’s time all the female roles were actually played by boys. I still remember quite a lot of the speeches I learned then, including all of Lady Macbeth’s famous Act I soliloquy The raven himself is hoarse. I’ll keep that for another post, so that no compunctious visitings of nature distract me from reading grant applications.

The speech below is remarkable for two things, I think. One is that it’s where one of the central themes of the play is laid bare: the numbing of the moral sense. Lady Macbeth has just died, but Macbeth himself seems no longer to care. He’s indifferent to everything around him, as the events that his ambitions have set in motion carry him to his ultimate doom. The incessant, mechanical rhythm of the verse accentuates this sense of inevitability.

The other thing is that, with the exception of some passages from Hamlet, this short excerpt has a higher density of familiar phrases than just about anything else in Shakespeare. Titles of novels and TV programmes figure prominently throughout the text but somehow it has survived all that borrowing without any diminution of its dramatic effect.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It’s almost as if the immortal bard himself knew what it was like to have to travel to Swindon over and over again…


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After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on October 26, 2010 by telescoper

This, written by W.H. Auden, is probably one of the most famous poems written about physics. A quick google about showed me that Cosmic Variance already featured it, along with a bit of an explanation of some of the scientific references contained within it. What I’m not sure whether what that article says about Auden’s own father was a physicist is correct. I always thought he was a medical doctor…

 

If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so’s,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover’s kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one’s neck.

Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.

Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidean space:
Exploded myths – but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?

This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude’s extremes
Really become a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn

You can hear a recording, made in 1965, of the poet himself reading this poem here.


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Insomniac

Posted in Poetry with tags , on October 22, 2010 by telescoper

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole —
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon’s rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments–the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue —
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

by Sylvia Plath (1932-63)


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O World of Many Worlds

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on October 12, 2010 by telescoper

You probably don’t associate the poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) with cosmology or astrophysics, as his poems were almost exclusively about the horror of war. This one, however,  which was begun in 1913, before the First World War broke out – Owen himself enlisted in 1915 –  will surely strike several chords with those interested in the use of the phrase Many Worlds in other contexts, and it also contains a number of astronomical references.

O World of many worlds, O life of lives,
What centre hast thou? Where am I?
O whither is it thy fierce onrush drives?
Fight I, or drift; or stand; or fly?

The loud machinery spins, points work in touch;
Wheels whirl in systems, zone in zone.
Myself having sometime moved with such,
Would strike a centre of mine own.

Lend hand, O Fate, for I am down, am lost!
Fainting by violence of the Dance…
Ah thanks, I stand – the floor is crossed,
And I am where but few advance.

I see men far below me where they swarm…
(Haply above me – be it so!
Does space to compass-points conform,
And can we say a star stands high or low?)

Not more complex the millions of the stars
Than are the hearts of mortal brothers;
As far remote as Neptune from small Mars
Is one man’s nature from another’s.

But all hold course unalterably fixed;
They follow destinies foreplanned:
I envy not these lives in their faith unmixed,
I would not step with such a band.

To be a meteor, fast, eccentric, lone,
Lawless; in passage through all spheres,
Warning the earth of wider ways unknown
And rousing men with heavenly fears…

This is the track reserved for my endeavour;
Spanless the erring way I wend.
Blackness of darkness is my meed for ever?
And barren plunging without end?

O glorious fear! Those other wandering souls
High burning through that outer bourne
Are lights unto themselves. Fair aureoles
Self-radiated these are worn.

And when in after times those stars return
And strike once more earth’s horizon,
They gather many satellites astern,
For they are greater than this system’s Sun.



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National Poetry Day

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on October 7, 2010 by telescoper

In case you hadn’t realised, today is National Poetry Day. I sometimes post poems on here whenever I have the urge – either because they’re favourites of mine or because they seem topical. For a change, and to celebrate the special nature of today, I thought I’d try to solicit some from my friends and colleagues via Facebook or Twitter.

This, Welsh Landscape by R.S. Thomas, was suggested by Rhodri Evans.

To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood
That went into the making of the wild sky,
Dyeing the immaculate rivers
In all their courses.
It is to be aware,
Above the noisy tractor
And hum of the machine
Of strife in the strung woods,
Vibrant with sped arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales.
There is the language for instance,
The soft consonants
Strange to the ear.
There are cries in the dark at night
As owls answer the moon,
And thick ambush of shadows,
Hushed at the fields’ corners.
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song.


This one, Beauty, by Edward Thomas was suggested by Steve Eales.

WHAT does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph–
“Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.” Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening when it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, hapily
Floats through a window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale;
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unanswering to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there


Here’s one from me. I learnt it at school where I studied German for one year before giving it up. I had a rather eccentric teacher who thought the best way to learn a language was to read poetry rather than learning how to say banal things like “Please can you direct me to the railway station?”. It wasn’t a very good idea, but at least it left me with bits of German poetry still in my head over 30 years later. I can still remember every word of this wonderful poem by Goethe …

Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen Blühn,
Im dunklen Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht,
Kennst du es wohl?
Dahin! Dahin,
Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn.

Kennst du das Haus? Auf Säulen ruht sein Dach,
Es glänzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach,
Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an:
Was hat man dir, du armes Kind getan?
Kennst du es wohl?
Dahin! Dahin
Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Beschützer, ziehn!

Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg?
Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen weg:
In Höhlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut;
Es stürzt der Fels und über ihn die Flut,
Kennst du ihn wohl?
Dahin! Dahin
Geht unser weg! o Vater, laß uns ziehn!

If you have a favourite of your own you’d like to suggest, please let me know through the suggestions box…

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