What do I owe to you
Who loved me deep and long?
You never gave my spirit wings
Or gave my heart a song.
But oh, to him I loved,
Who loved me not at all,
I owe the open gate
That led through heaven’s wall.
by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
Follow @telescoperI posted this poem after the terrible events in Norway last year. Sadly the awful killings in Newton, Connecticut make it relevant again.
The full title is A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London and it was written by Dylan Thomas. Published just after the end of the Second World War, it was written some time earlier when Thomas heard news of a young girl who had burned to death when the house she was in was set on fire during an air raid. Here is the poet himself reading it.
The idea behind the poem is complex, and its message double-edged, but Thomas finds a perfect balance between horror and sadness, and between indignation and heartbreak. Children shouldn’t have to die, and neither should anyone else whose life is cut short by another’s hand, but we have to accept that they can and do. There’s no consolation to be found in mourning and in any case it’s hypocritical to favour one death with elegies, when suffering is so widespread. The best we can do is allow the dead some dignity and their families and loved ones some time to grieve.
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.
I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university.
And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints,
And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I’ve never been in certain places.
It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.
Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.
by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
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How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness every where!
And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time;
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.
Sonnet No.97 , by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Follow @telescoperThe rain and the wind, the wind and the rain —
They are with us like a disease:
They worry the heart, they work the brain,
As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane,
And savage the helpless trees.
What does it profit a man to know
These tattered and tumbling skies
A million stately stars will show,
And the ruining grace of the after-glow
And the rush of the wild sunrise?
Ever the rain — the rain and the wind!
Come, hunch with me over the fire,
Dream of the dreams that leered and grinned,
Ere the blood of the Year got chilled and thinned,
And the death came on desire!
by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903).
Follow @telescoperI almost forgot to post something to mark this very special day which is celebrated throughout the civilised world. Yes, of course, it is the Feast of St Cecilia. And not only that, it is Benjamin Britten‘s birthday. So why not kill two birds with one stone? And I don’t mean turkeys…
Follow @telescoperNo sun–no moon!
No morn–no noon!
No dawn–no dusk–no proper time of day–
No sky–no earthly view–
No distance looking blue–
No road–no street–no “t’other side this way”–
No end to any Row–
No indications where the Crescents go–
No top to any steeple–
No recognitions of familiar people–
No courtesies for showing ’em–
No knowing ’em!
No traveling at all–no locomotion–
No inkling of the way–no notion–
“No go” by land or ocean–
No mail–no post–
No news from any foreign coast–
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility–
No company–no nobility–
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member–
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds–
November
by Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
Follow @telescoperThe sky is streaked with them
burning hole in black space —
like fireworks, someone says
all friendly in the dark chill
of Newcomb Hollow in November,
friends known only by voices.
We lie on the cold sand and it
embraces us, this beach
where locals never go in summer
and boast of their absence. Now
we lie eyes open to the flowers
of white ice that blaze over us
and seem to imprint directly
on our brains. I feel the earth,
rolling beneath as we face out
into the endlessness we usually
ignore. Past the evanescent
meteors, infinity pulls hard.
by Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
P.S. In case you didn’t know, the Leonids is an often prolific meteor shower that has its radiant in the constellation of Leo and which peaks at about this time of year.
Follow @telescoperSo here I am, then, in Copenhagen. Yesterday evening, as far as I’m concerned, at least, my wavefunction collapsed along with the rest of me into a definite location. Ibsen’s Hotel, in fact. I had a pleasantly uneventful journey to Heathrow by train. The plane thence arrived in Copenhagen twenty minutes ahead of time, and then I had the chance to marvel at wonderful Copenhagen’s wonderfully efficient public transport in the form of the Metro that took me to about 100 metres from my hotel. All very relaxed and stress-free.
This morning I got up bright and early, determined to avoid the queues at breakfast, but was inevitably foiled by dozens of uber-efficient Germans who were already there at 7am when it opened. Fortunately I managed to find a quiet place in the corner to drink my coffee while they basked in their own smugness and barked orders at the waitresses.
Anyway, it’s still pretty dark outside so I thought I’d post something before walking to the Niels Bohr Institute for the day’s business. Since I’m in Denmark I thought I’d put up one of the wonderfully witty little poems written by Danish mathematician Piet Hein. He called each of these verses a “grook” (or actually, in Danish, the word is gruk) and he wrote thousands of them over his long life. Many, like this one, are utterly brilliant.
Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
and you’re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No – not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping.
by Piet Hein (1905-1996).
Follow @telescoperA news item today about BOSS (yet another observational cosmology survey) gives me an excuse to recycle an idea from an old post.
The phrase expletive deleted was made popular at the time of Watergate after the release of the expurgated tapes made by Richard Nixon in the Oval Office when he was President of the United States of America. These showed that, as well as been a complete crook, he was practically unable to speak a single sentence without including a swear word.
Nowadays the word expletive is generally taken to mean an oath or exclamation, particularly if it is obscene, but that’s not quite what it really means. Derived from the latin verb explere (“to fill out”) from which the past participle is expletus, the meaning of the word in the context of English grammar is “something added to a phrase or sentence that isn’t strictly needed for the grammatical sense”. An expletive is added either to fill a syntactical role or, in a poem, simply to make a line fit some metrical rule.
Examples of the former can be found in constructions like “It takes two to Tango” or “There is a lot of crime in Nottingham”; neither “it” nor “there” should really be needed but English just seems to like to have something before the verb.
The second kind of use is illustrated wonderfully by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism, which is a kind of guide to what to avoid in writing poetry. It’s a tour de force for its perceptiveness and humour. The following excerpt is pricelessly apt
These equal syllables alone require,
Tho’ oft the open vowels tire;
While expletives their feeble aid do join;
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line
Here the expletive is “do”, and it is cleverly incorporated in the line talking about expletives, adding the syllable needed to fit with a strict pentameter. Apparently, poets often used this construction before Pope attacked it but it quickly fell from favour afterwards.
His other prosodic targets are the “open vowels” which means initial vowels that produce an ugly glottal sound, such as in “oft” (especially ugly when following “Tho”). The last line is brilliant too, showing how using only monosyllabic “low” words makes for a line that plods along tediously just like it says.
It’s amazing how much Pope managed to fit into this poem, given the restrictions imposed by the closed couplet structure he adopted. Each idea is compressed into a unit of twenty syllables, two lines of ten syllables with a rhyme at the end of each. This is such an impressive exercise in word-play that it reminds me a lot of the skill showed by the best cryptic crossword setters. Needless to say I’m no more successful at writing poetry than I am at setting crossword clues.
Anyway, what’s all this got to do with cosmology?
Well, I was reminded of it when I attended the 2012 Gerald Whitrow Lecture by Andrew Liddle last Friday at the Royal Astronomical Society, during which he talked, amongst other things, about Dark Energy.
The Dark Energy is an ingredient added to the standard model of cosmology to reconcile observations of a flat Universe with a matter density that seems too low to account for it.
Other than that it makes the cosmological metric work out satisfactorily (geddit?), we don’t understand what Dark Energy really is or why there is as much of it. Indeed, many of us would rather it wasn’t there at all, because we think the resulting model is inelegant or even ugly, and are trying to think of other cosmological models that do not require its introduction.
In other words, Dark Energy is an expletive (though not one that’s been deleted).
Incidentally, one of the things Andrew said in his talk – and I agree with him 100% – is that in some sense we already know enough about dark energy from observations that we know we don’t understand it at all from a theoretical point of view. Bigger and better surveys, such as Euclid, producing more and more data will characterize its properties with greater statistical accuracy, but they won’t on their own solve the Dark Energy puzzle. For that we need better theoretical understanding.
My own view is that the problem of the vacuum energy is of the same character as the ultraviolet catastrophe that ushered in the era of quantum physics: a big problem that needs a big solution. What I mean by that is that it’s not something that can be resolved by tinkering with the existing theoretical framework. Something much more radical is needed.
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In the Dark 