It’s almost sunset, but I just saw a rainbow on the way back from the corner shop. It reminded me of this lovely little poem.
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
by William Wordsworth (1770-1850).
Follow @telescoperThose long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;
And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheats’ restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word–the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
by Philip Larkin (1922-1985).
I came across this while searching for a poem to post on an August Bank Holiday (because today is one of those). I hadn’t expect to find something like this though! Larkin isn’t known as a war poet, but I find his detachment and use of irony in this poem- e.g. comparing the lines of men in the trenches to those queuing to watch cricket or football – as devastating as some of the more obviously visceral works of the genre.
Follow @telescoperIn view of my current rather hectic schedule – why else would I be up at this ungodly hour? – I thought I’d combine another bit of recycling with some audience participation. I’ve updated below the list of Haiku I posted some time ago with some new ones I’ve jotted down at random intervals over the intervening months.
How about a few Haiku of your own on themes connected to astronomy, cosmology or physics?
Don’t be worried about making the style of your contributions too authentic, just make sure they are 17 syllables in total, and split into three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables respectively.
Here are some of my own to get you started:
Quantum Gravity:
The troublesome double-act
Of Little and Large
Gravity’s waves are
Traceless; which does not mean they
Can never be found
The Big Bang wasn’t
So big, at least not when you
Think in decibels.
Cosmological
Constant and Dark Energy
Are vacuous names
Microwave Background
Photons remember a time
When they were hotter
Isotropic and
Homogeneous metric?
Robertson-Walker
Galaxies evolve
In a complicated way
We don’t understand
Acceleration:
Type Ia Supernovae
Gave us the first clue
Cosmic Inflation
Could have stretched the Universe
And made it flatter
Astrophysicist
Is what I’m told is my Job
Title. Whatever.
“Clusters look cool,” said
Sunyaev and Zel’dovich,
“because they are hot”.
Gaussianity
is produced by inflation,
normally speaking.
Gravity waves are
a kind of perturbation;
they make you tensor
Bubble collisions
Leave marks in the C-M-B
To please A. Linde
This Haiku contains
“Baryon Oscillations”
in its middle line.
What should we build next:
S-K-A or E-L-T?
Or maybe neither…?
J W* S T,
(the James Webb Space Telescope);
long name, big budget
* “W” has to be pronounced “dubya” for this one to work!
Contributions welcome via the comments box. The best one gets a chance to win Bully’s star prize.
Follow @telescoperThere is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Follow @telescoperI’m off travelling for a few days to a conference, of which more anon (assuming I succeed in connecting to the interwebs while I’m away). It will do me some good to change location after the terrible week I’ve just had. Anyway, I thought I’d leave you with a whimsical poem while I’m travelling. It’s a bit silly, I know, but I like it. It’s called Love and Tensor Algebra and it was written by Stanislaw Lem.
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not – for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product of four scalars it defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.
Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.
Night in the socket rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limits of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter’s robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.
Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotment the dawn halts.
by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Follow @telescoperI feed a flame within, which so torments me
That it both pains my heart, and yet contents me:
‘Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it,
That I had rather die than once remove it.
Yet he, for whom I grieve, shall never know it;
My tongue does not betray, nor my eyes show it.
Not a sigh, nor a tear, my pain discloses,
But they fall silently, like dew on roses.
Thus, to prevent my Love from being cruel,
My heart ‘s the sacrifice, as ’tis the fuel;
And while I suffer this to give him quiet,
My faith rewards my love, though he deny it.
On his eyes will I gaze, and there delight me;
While I conceal my love no frown can fright me.
To be more happy I dare not aspire,
Nor can I fall more low, mounting no higher.
by John Dryden (1631-1700).
Follow @telescoperThis poem by Dylan Thomas, arguably his greatest, was first published just after the end of the Second World War and was written after 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. The full title is A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London.
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.
During my delayed journey yesterday I passed some of the time by following the reaction on Twitter to the terrible events in Norway. I wish I hadn’t. Such events bring out the ghloulish worst in some people, and the worst of the worst is always to be found on the internet. Going online is sometimes like lifting the lid on a cesspit.
I was going to post something myself, but having realised that I don’t really care much for what other people think about this, I can see no point in adding to the blizzard of opinion. Far better to post this, which expresses everything I might have aspired to say far more eloquently than I ever could.
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.
Here comes another alpha male,
and all the other alphas
are snorting and pawing,
kicking up puffs of acrid dust
while the silly little hens
clatter back and forth
on quivering claws and raise
a titter about the fuss.
Here comes another alpha male–
a man’s man, a dealmaker,
holds tanks of liquor,
charms them pantsless at lunch:
I’ve never been sicker.
Do I have to stare into his eyes
and sympathize? If I want my job
I do. Well I think I’m through
with the working world,
through with warming eggs
and being Zenlike in my detachment
from all things Ego.
I’d like to go
somewhere else entirely,
and I don’t mean
Europe.
