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O World of Many Worlds

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags Many Worlds, Poetry, Wilfred Owen 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 Edward Thomas, National Poetry Day, R. S. Thomas 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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I Am

Posted in Poetry on September 27, 2010 by telescoper

After reading an example of his verse in last week’s weekend Guardian, I decided to buy a book of Selected Poems (in the wonderful Everyman edition for only £3!) by John Clare in Blackwell’s while I was in Oxford on Saturday. I’m ashamed to say I was completely unfamiliar with his work until then. His biography is unusual for a 19th Century poet, in that he was not from a wealthy background, was largely self-educated, and had no private income. In later life he suffered from a depressive illness, endured a number of nervous breakdowns and was, at various times, confined to an asylum. Not highly regarded in his lifetime, his reputation was revived in the 20th Century and he is now considered to be one of the finest poets of his generation.

This, probably his most famous poem, was written by Clare in 1844 or 1845, while he was confined in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. In a style highly reminiscent of Byron, it speaks most movingly of the sense of alienation his illness has brought upon him and how he yearns for peace and solitude.

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest–that I loved the best–
Are strange–nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil’d or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below–above the vaulted sky.

The Instinct of Hope

Posted in Biographical, Poetry, Science Politics with tags John Clare, Poetry, STFC on September 23, 2010 by telescoper

A strenuous and stressful three days commuting to and from sunny Swindon for the STFC Astronomy Grants Panel are now over, just in time for the onset of teaching term next week. For reasons of confidentiality I can’t talk about the actual business of the grants panel, and it’s nowhere near finished anyway – there are several more meetings to come before any results come out. I would say, though, that it’s a curious job that manages to be both inspiring and depressing at the same time. The inspiring thing is that you get to read about so much really exciting science being done by all kinds of people in departments all over the country; the depressing thing is knowing that there isn’t anywhere near enough money to support all the things that one would like to in an ideal world. And our world is becoming less like an ideal one every day…

I decided for these three days not to stay in Swindon but to commute to and from from Cardiff. On balance, I think that was a good decision: I got to sleep in my own bed, didn’t have to arrange for someone to do Columbo’s jabs, and also saved STFC quite a bit of money – a day return from Cardiff to Swindon, a trip of almost exactly one hour each way, is only £26.80 at peak time. The downside was that I’ve been up at 5am each morning and have been in a vegetative state by the time I got home each evening, including this one!

Anyway, lacking the energy to put together a proper post, I’ll just put up this poem by John Clare which appeared in the Guardian last saturday and which, for some reason, popped into my head during the train journey home. Somehow it seems apt.

Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Something about me daily speaks there must,
And why should instinct nourish hopes in vain?
‘Tis nature’s prophesy that such will be,
And everything seems struggling to explain
The close sealed volume of its mystery.
Time wandering onward keeps its usual pace
As seeming anxious of eternity,
To meet that calm and find a resting place.
E’en the small violet feels a future power
And waits each year renewing blooms to bring,
And surely man is no inferior flower
To die unworthy of a second spring?

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The Ladies of Llangollen

Posted in History, Poetry with tags Llangollen, Plas Newydd, William Wordsworth on September 19, 2010 by telescoper

I was doing the crossword in the Times Literary Supplement this morning and one of the clues triggered only a distant memory which I had to check via the fount of all wisdom that is Google. The clue referred to a “Vale of Friendship” which I’d vaguely remembered seeing in a poem by William Wordsworth. Anyway, I was right in remembering the origin of the phrase, but I accidentally found out a lot more about the context as well and thought I’d share it here.

In fact there’s an entire wikipedia page devoted to the Ladies of Llangollen, so there’s no need to reproduce it all here. However, for the sake of you who haven’t heard of them, they were Lady Eleanor Charlotte Butler and the Honourable Sarah Ponsonby. They were of Anglo-Irish extraction and had been brought up just a few miles from each other in Ireland. They met in 1768 and immediately hit it off together. They ran off together to avoid being forced into unwanted marriage, and moved to Wales in order to set up home at Plas Newydd, near Llangollen in Denbighshire, in 1780.

They lived together for the best part of 50 years in Plas Newydd, in relative seclusion, devoting their time to private studies of literature and languages and improving their estate, comprehensively redesigning the house in a Gothic style, and adding a superb garden. They did not actively socialise and town-dwellers of Llangollen seem to have regarded them as eccentrics, simply referring to them as “The Ladies”.

Gradually, their life attracted the interest of the outside world. Their house became a haven for all manner of visitors, mostly writers such as Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Shelley, Byron and Scott, but also the military leader Duke of Wellington and industrialist Josiah Wedgwood; aristocratic novelist Caroline Lamb, who was born a Ponsonby, came to visit too. Even travellers from continental Europe had heard of the couple and came to visit them, for instance Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, the German nobleman and landscape designer who wrote admiringly about them.

The story of the “romantic friendship” between these two ladies is both charming and moving, but it’s also fascinating to learn how their lifestyle was accepted and even celebrated by wider society. One might have thought their relationship would have been regarded as scandalous by their contemporaries, rather than being widely admired as it turned out to be. One is tempted to assume that their “marriage” had a sexual dimension, which it may well have done, but it could have been a platonic, yet still romantic, friendship. As far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t really matter; what I find inspiring about them is that they dared to be different.

Anyway, here is the beautiful sonnet that William Wordsworth wrote after meeting the Ladies of Llangollen in 1824, although I believe the Ladies took exception to the description of their magnificent house as a “low-roofed cot”!

A stream, to mingle with your favourite Dee,
Along the vale of meditation flows;
So styled by those fierce Britons, pleased to see
In Nature’s face the expression of repose;
Or haply there some pious hermit chose
To live and die, the peace of heaven his aim;
To whom the wild sequestered region owes
At this late day, its sanctifying name.
Glyn Cafaillgaroch, in the Cambrian tongue,
In ours, the Vale of Friendship, let ‘this’ spot
Be named; where, faithful to a low-roofed Cot,
On Deva’s banks, ye have abode so long;
Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,
Even on this earth, above the reach of Time!

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Close of Play

Posted in Cricket, Poetry with tags cricket, Glamorgan, Poetry, Thomas Moult on September 17, 2010 by telescoper

The summer draws ever nearer to its close and autumn beckons.

The latest marker of the turning season to rush past was the last match of cricket’s County Championship, which ended yesterday. It was a disappointing finale for my local team, Glamorgan, who had a chance of winning promotion to Division 1 having spent most of the season in second place in Division 2. However, after a feeble first innings batting performance against Derbyshire – and a lot of rain here in Cardiff – they could only draw their final game. Meanwhile, third-placed Worcestershire responded to a generous declaration by first-placed Sussex by scoring 306-6 in only 55 overs to win with time to spare. Thus, Sussex and Worcestershire (who got relegated last year) get promoted back to Division 1, while Kent and Essex (who were promoted last year) get relegated. Better luck next year for Glamorgan. Nottinghamshire, by the way, won the Championship.

In the end it was quite an exciting final day of the county season but since it’s now all over until next spring it seems appropriate to mark the end of the County Championship with one of the classic cricket poems, Close of Play, by Thomas Moult.

How shall we live, now that the summer’s ended,
And bat and ball (too soon!) are put aside,
And all our cricket deeds and dreams have blended —
The hit for six, the champion bowled for none,
The match we planned to win and never won? …
Only in Green-winged memory they abide.

How shall we live, who love our loveliest game
With such bright ardour that when stumps are drawn
We talk into the twilight, always the same
Old talk with laughter round off each tale —
Laughter of friends across a pint of ale
In the blue shade of the pavilion.

For the last time a batsman is out, the day
Like the drained glass and the dear sundown field
is empty; what instead of Summer’s play
Can occupy these darkling months ere spring
Hails willows once again the crowned king?
How shall we live so life may not be chilled?

Well, what’s a crimson hearth for, and the lamp
Of winter nights, and these plump yellow books
That cherish Wisden’s soul and bear his stamp —
And bat and ball (too soon!) are put aside,
Time’s ever changing, unalterable score-board,
Thick-clustered with a thousand names adored:
Half the game’s magic in their very looks!

And when we’ve learnt those almanacs by heart,
And shared with Nyren … Cardus ….the distant thrill
That cannot fade since they have had their part,
We’ll trudge wet streets through fog and mire
And praise our heroes by the club-room fire:
O do not doubt the game will hold us still!

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Star-gazer

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags astronomy, Louis MacNeice, Poetry on September 11, 2010 by telescoper

Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright
Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because
Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks
How very far off they were, it seemed their light
Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.

And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left alive
To run from side to side in a late night train
Admiring it and adding noughts in vain.

(written in 1963, by Louis MacNeice)

Alone

Posted in Poetry with tags Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry on September 3, 2010 by telescoper

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then – in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life – was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

by Edgar Allan Poe.

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The Character of a Happy Life

Posted in Poetry with tags Henry Wotton, Poetry on August 29, 2010 by telescoper

How happy is he born or taught
That serveth not another’s will,
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his highest skill;

Whose passions not his masters are;
Whose soul is still prepared for death,
Untied unto the world with care
Of princes’ grace or vulgar breath;

Who envies none whom chance doth raise,
Or vice; who never understood
The deepest wounds are given by praise,
By rule of state but not of good;

Who hath his life from rumours freed,
Whose conscience is his strong retreat,
Whose state can neither flatterers feed
Nor ruins make accusers great;

Who God doth late and early pray
More of his grace than goods to send,
And entertains the harmless day
With a well-chosen book or friend.

This man is free from servile bands
Of hope to rise or fear to fall,
Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all.

by Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639).

Death and Strawberries

Posted in Poetry with tags Edwin Morgan, mathematics, Physics, Poetry, VI Arnold on August 20, 2010 by telescoper

This week in August 2010 has taken on quite a melancholy mood. Only a few days ago there was the death of physicist Nicola Cabibbo. Yesterday I heard that the great Russian mathematician Vladimir Igorevich Arnold, who did a lot of work of interest to physicists, had also passed away aged 72. And then this morning I was saddened to hear of the death of the wonderful Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, of pneumonia, at the age of 90.

It’s always sad when someone who has contributed so much to their field – whether it’s artistic or scientific – passes away, but the consolation is that each of them in their own way has left a wonderful legacy that remains to be treasured and will also inspire future generations.

Anyway, I thought I’d mark the passing of Edwin Morgan with my favourite poem of his, called Strawberries.

There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open french window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air

in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates

It may surprise you to learn that this poem is not written by a man to a woman, but from one man to another. A similar reaction is sometimes provoked by certain of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It came as a shock to quite a few people when it was finally revealed, in fact, because Edwin Morgan kept to himself for a very long time who this was written about. Actually, it wasn’t until he was 70 that the poet stepped out of the closet, announced that he was gay, and explained that the poem was written about an experience he shared with another man. He maintained that at least part of the reason for him not being open publically was that he didn’t want to be branded as a “gay” poet, and that his poems were intended to be universal, which (in my view) they are but then that depends on what kind of universe you live in.

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In the Dark