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Poem in October

Posted in Poetry with tags Dylan Thomas, Poem in October on October 2, 2009 by telescoper

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

And the mussel pooled and the heron

Priested shore

The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

Myself to set foot

That second

In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

Above the farms and the white horses

And I rose

In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

Over the border

And the gates

Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October

Summery

On the hill’s shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

To the rain wringing

Wind blow cold

In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

With its horns through mist and the castle

Brown as owls

But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

There could I marvel

My birthday

Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country

And down the other air and the blue altered sky

Streamed again a wonder of summer

With apples

Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

Through the parables

Of sun light

And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.

These were the woods the river and sea

Where a boy

In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

And the mystery

Sang alive

Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

O may my heart’s truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year’s turning.

(by Dylan Thomas).

Also Sprach Zarathustra

Posted in Biographical, Music, Poetry with tags Also Sprach Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, moon landings, Richard Strauss, T.S. Eliot on September 8, 2009 by telescoper

Today is the 60th anniversary of the death of the great composer Richard Strauss in 1949. I’ve already used up the music which is probably the most appropriate for this occasion, so I thought I’d mark it instead with a clip from the work that is probably most familiar to my likely readership, Also Sprach Zarathustra, as used in the closing stages of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This little clip is from the final stages of the film, though the music itself is from the opening segment of the Strauss work, the part that represents the Sunrise.

For people of my age, this music is inextricably linked not only with the film, but also with the TV coverage of the moon landings that happened about the same time as its release, about 40 years ago, and for which it also provided the theme music. I don’t know which came first. I’d love to be able to say that these events are behind what made me become an astrophysicist but, as I’ve explained before, the truth is somewhat different.

Anyway, the theme of transfiguration and rebirth depicted in the movie seems to me to be one more closely related to Strauss’ earlier work Tod und Verklärung, and it always makes me think of the following lines from East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets by TS Eliot:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

14 Comments »

Cosmic Haiku

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags astronomy, Cosmology, Haiku, Physics on September 6, 2009 by telescoper

I haven’t had much time to post today and will probably be too busy next week for anything too substantial, so I thought I’d resort to a bit of audience participation. How about a few Haiku 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’s a few of my own to give you an idea!

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.

Contributions welcome via the comments box. The best one gets a chance to win Bully’s star prize.

12 Comments »

The Normal Heart

Posted in Poetry with tags Poetry, September 1st 1939, WH Auden on September 1, 2009 by telescoper

It’s now exactly 70 years since the start of World War Two, as it was on this date in 1939 that Germany invaded Poland. On hearing the news, WH Auden composed this poem. Although the poet himself grew to dislike it, it became one of his most famous poems and has many resonances still in today’s world.

September 1st, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

3 Comments »

Consummation

Posted in Music, Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags Gerald Finzi, Metaphysical Poets, Thomas Traherne on August 27, 2009 by telescoper

Not long ago I put up an item containing a poem by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Since I’ve been reading a collection which contains poems by another of the metaphysical poets, Thomas Traherne, I thought I’d pick one of his to put up too.

I was also reminded of Traherne’s poetry when John Peacock commented on another recent post because it was he that introduced me to the truly wonderful musical settings of some of Traherne’s poetry made by Gerald Finzi in his cantata Dies Natalis, and pointed me in the direction of the stunning recording of that work made by Wilfred Brown with the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Christopher Finzi (son of Gerald). Why Finzi – and especially that work – is not better known is something I’ll never understand. But that’s another story…

The story of Thomas Traherne’s poetry is strange and fascinating. The son of a cobbler, he was a devoutly religious man who lived most of his short life (1637-1674) in relative obscurity as a clergyman and theologian. He was a prolific writer of both prose and poetry, but very little of his work was published during his lifetime. Vast number of handwritten manuscripts survived his death, however, and many of these remained in the safekeeping of a local family in his native Herefordshire. However, in 1888 the estate of this family was wound up, sold, and the manuscripts became dispersed. Eventually, in 1897, one set of papers was accidentally discovered in a bookstall. Traherne’s first volume of verse was published in 1903 and a second collection followed in 1908.

When these poems finally found their way into the literary world they were greeted with astonishment as well as deep appreciation and they were widely influential: TS Eliot was a great admirer of Traherne, as was Dorothy L Sayers. The timing of their publication probably explains why Finzi’s music teacher, Ernest Farrar, suggested them to his young student; Finzi was born in 1901 and Farrar taught him as a young boy before he was called up for service in the First World War and killed in action in 1918.

Over the years further manuscripts have also come to light – literally, in one case, because in 1967 another lost Traherne manuscript was found, on fire, in a rubbish dump and rescued in the nick of time.

Traherne is sometimes described as the last metaphysical poet and, indeed, the last poems in the collection I have been reading are by him. However, it seems to me he might equally be described as the first romantic poet. The themes he tackles – love of nature and loss of childhood innocence – and his visionary, rhapsodic style have as much in common with William Blake and, especially, William Wordsworth as they do with better known metaphysical poets such as John Donne.

Traherne’s most famous poem is probably Shadows in the Water, but I decided to pick a relatively obscure one, primarily because it deals with matters close to the concerns of a cosmologist! The central theme is the inadequacy of human thought processes in finding a true description of reality or, if you like, full intercourse with nature. For the poet, this can only be achieved through God. This is the consummation referred to in the title.

He’s particularly good at capturing how we tend to gloss over difficulties with our conceptual framework and how we invent things to plug the gaps. I particularly like the lines from the fourth verse “Wherein because we no//Object distinctly find or know,//We sundry things invent,//That may our fancy give content.” Dark matter?

Consummation

The thoughts of men appear
Freely to move within a sphere
Of endless reach; and run
Though in the soul, beyond the sun.
The ground on which they acted be
Is unobserved infinity.

Extended through the sky,
Though here, beyond it far they fly:
Abiding in the mind
An endless liberty they find:
Throughout all spaces can extend,
Nor ever meet or know an end.

They, in their native sphere,
At boundless distances appear:
Eternity can measure;
Its no beginning see with pleasure.
Thus in the mind an endless space
Doth naturally display its face.

Wherein because we no
Object distinctly find or know,
We sundry things invent,
That may our fancy give content;
See points of space beyond the sky,
And in those points see creatures lie;

Spy fishes in the seas,
Conceit them swimming there with ease;
The dolphins and the whales,
Their very fins, their very scales,
As there within the briny deep
Their tails the flowing waters sweep.

Can see the very skies,
As if the same were in our eyes;
The sun, though in the night,
As if it moved within our sight;
One space beyond another still
Discovered; think while ye will.

Which though we don’t descry,
(Much like by night an idle eye,
Not shaded with a lid,
But in a darksome dungeon hid)
At last shall in a glorious day
Be made its objects to display,

And then shall ages be,
Within its wide eternity;
All kingdoms stand
Howe’er remote, yet nigh at hand;
The skies, and what beyond them lie,
Exposed unto every eye.

Nor shall we then invent
Not alter things; but with content
All in their places see,
As doth the glorious deity;
Within the scope of whose great mind,
We all in their true nature find.

5 Comments »

Upon Nothing

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot, Metaphysical Poets on August 15, 2009 by telescoper

I used to live in Wilmot Street in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London. I’d been resident there quite a while before I realised that the street was named after John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, one of the great metaphysical poets, who lived from 1647 to 1680 (although I doubt he ever lived in Bethnal Green).

John Wilmot was a lifelong atheist, bon viveur and generally dissolute individual who famously converted to Christianity on his deathbed, causing much debate about whether he actually meant it.

Much of Wilmot’s literary output is actually quite crude (and often pornographic). However, first published in 1679, Upon Nothing is certainly among the cleverest of his works and is possibly the most important poem he wrote. It’s clearly a satire on John Milton‘s Paradise Lost (especially Book II). Starting out with a dig at the vanity of man’s attempts to solve the problem of existence, it moves into a more general lampoon of fashion victims, pompous politicians and self-important persons generally.

Updated by a few hundred years, this poem could equally be applied to the programme of quantum cosmology advocated by, e.g. Alexander Vilenkin which tries to explain the existence of the Universe by quantum tunneling ex nihilo. I always have a problem understanding how the equations of quantum mechanics could exist, as it were, in advance of the material they try to describe. I suppose the point is that there’s really no such thing as nothing, but then I’m no metaphysicist…

Upon Nothing

Nothing, thou elder brother even to shade,
That hadst a being ere the world was made,
And (well fixed) art alone of ending not afraid.

Ere time and place were, time and place were not,
When primitive Nothing Something straight begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united—What?

Something, the general attribute of all,
Severed from thee, its sole original,
Into thy boundless self must undistinguished fall.

Yet Something did thy mighty power command,
And from thy fruitful emptiness’s hand,
Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, air, and land.

Matter, the wickedest offspring of thy race,
By Form assisted, flew from thy embrace,
And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face.

With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join,
Body, thy foe, with these did leagues combine
To spoil thy peaceful realm, and ruin all thy line.

But turncoat Time assists the foe in vain,
And, bribed by thee, assists thy short-lived reign,
And to thy hungry womb drives back thy slaves again.

Though mysteries are barred from laic eyes,
And the Divine alone with warrant pries
Into thy bosom, where thy truth in private lies,

Yet this of thee the wise may freely say,
Thou from the virtuous nothing takest away,
And to be part of thee the wicked wisely pray.

Great Negative, how vainly would the wise
Inquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise?
Didst thou not stand to point their dull philosophies.

Is, or is not, the two great ends of Fate,
And true or false, the subject of debate,
That perfects, or destroys, the vast designs of Fate,

When they have racked the politician’s breast,
Within thy bosom most securely rest,
And, when reduced to thee, are least unsafe and best.

But Nothing, why does Something still permit
That sacred monarchs should at council sit
With persons highly thought at best for nothing fit?

Whist weighty Something modestly abstains
From princes’ coffers, and from statesmen’s brains,
And Nothing there like stately Nothing reigns,

Nothing, who dwellest with fools in grave disguise,
For whom they reverend shapes and forms devise,
Lawn sleeves, and furs, and gowns, when they like thee look wise.

French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy,
Hibernian learning, Scotch civility,
Spaniard’s dispatch, Dane’s wit are mainly seen in thee.

The great man’s gratitude to his best friend,
King’s promises, whore’s vows, towards thee they bend,
Flow swiftly to thee, and in thee never end.

Incidentally, the first use of the word metaphysical to describe the particular “poetic style, characterized by wit, syntactic complexity, and the use of elaborate and intricate schemes of imagery to express abstract ideas and emotional states” was in 1693, by John Dryden who clearly meant it to be pejorative. Those whose philosophical inclination is in the direction of positivism would look down on the more orthodox meaning of the word metaphysical, i.e. meaning “of or relating to the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things or reality, including questions about being, substance, time and space, causation, change, and identity”. Dryden, however, was alluding to another meaning, now quite rare but prevalent in the 17th Century, that has something to do with magical or supernatural things beyond the bounds of respectable thought. Thomas More used the word “metaphysical” to attack William Tyndale for translating the Bible into English, for example.

You can find other examples of metaphysical poetry in the collection I blogged about here.

7 Comments »

Dark August

Posted in Poetry with tags Derek Walcott on August 7, 2009 by telescoper

So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won’t come out.

Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume
like a kettle, rivers overrun; still,
she will not rise and turn off the rain.

She is in her room, fondling old things,
my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls
like a crash of plates from the sky,

she does not come out.
Don’t you know I love you but am hopeless
at fixing the rain ? But I am learning slowly

to love the dark days, the steaming hills,
the air with gossiping mosquitoes,
and to sip the medicine of bitterness,

so that when you emerge, my sister,
parting the beads of the rain,
with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,

all will not be as it was, but it will be true
(you see they will not let me love
as I want), because, my sister, then

I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones,
The black rain, the white hills, when once
I loved only my happiness and you.

by Derek Walcott.

3 Comments »

Return of the Clerihews!

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags astronomy, Clerihew, Cosmology on August 2, 2009 by telescoper

As a result of an after-dinner discussion at the meeting I attended last week, I’ve decided to put a revised cosmological clerihew collection back online. I’ve removed or edited those that caused the greatest offence, and added a few new ones.

Bernard Carr
Has gone a bit far:
His Anthropic Principle
Makes theories invincible

Sean Carroll
Has me over a barrel
Because the only plausible rhyme
Plugs his new book on Time

The mind of John Barrow
Is not very narrow:
He’s more open than me
To a variable c

Stephen Hawking
Lets a machine do the talking
But even he can’t vocalize in-
side a black hole horizon.

Joe Silk
Is one of that ilk
Who writes far more articles
Than there are elementary particles

Matt Griffin
Has healthy salad for tiffin
But he’d probably expire
If something went wrong with SPIRE.

Peter Ade
Would never be afraid
To enter his name
In the citation game

Andy Lawrence
Would shed tears in torrents
If they finally got rid
Of the Astrogrid

Steve Maddox
Never eats haddocks
But he’s quite a dab hand
In the optical band

Ofer Lahav
Is awfully suave
But must be getting nervy
About the cancellation of funding for the Dark Energy Survey

Joao Magueijo
Was on the Today Show
Talking some shite
About travelling faster than light

Keith Mason
Said to Lord Drayson
“Can we have some more money?”
He replied “Don’t try to be funny…”

Andrei Linde
Felt rather windy
A peculiar sensation:
The result of internal inflation?

To rhyme Carlos Frenck
I’ve drawn a complete blenk
But I found in the lexicon
A good one for Mexican

When Andrew Jaffe
Plots a new graph he
Thinks fits his theory he’ll
Tell everyone at Imperial

Paul Steinhardt
Said “Lust not after beauty in thine heart”
But why he did so
I really don’t know

Feel free to offer your own through the comments box, after consulting the rules, although I remind you I don’t accept anonymous comments, even if they’re funny.

29 Comments »

Beautiful Cosmos

Posted in Poetry with tags Ivor Cutler, Poetry on July 26, 2009 by telescoper

I’m currently in transit to a conference in Ascona (Switzerland) so I thought I’d leave you for a while with something from the wacky and whimsical, weird and wonderful world of Ivor Cutler:

For the Cosmonauts

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags Meirion Jordan, Moonrise on July 15, 2009 by telescoper

Last week I bought a copy of Moonrise, a collection of poems by Meirion Jordan. He was born in Swansea and read Mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford. His poems, which often deal with themes inspired by science, are sometimes witty or satirical and sometimes simply a bit wild. They’re also beautifully composed, with a very natural structure and playful use of language.

I wanted to give his book a bit of a plug so here he is on Youtube reading For the Cosmonauts, which one of two pieces comprising the Epilogue to his book. This is the text

I, Yuri Gagarin, having not seen God,
wake now to the scrollwork of a body,
to my own white fibres leafing into the bone:
know that beyond this dome of rain there is
only the nothing where the soul sweers
out its parallax like a distant star and truth
brightens to X, to gamma, through a metal sail.

So I return to you, cramming your pockets
with the atmosphere and the evening news,
fumbling for gardens in the moon’s shadow,
in its waterfalls of silence. I wish for you
familiar towns, their piers and amusement arcades
unpeopled at dusk, the unicorn tumbling by
on china hooves behind the high walls
of parks, among congregating lamps.

May you find Earth rising there, between
your steepled hands. May your voyages
end. May you have a cold unfurling
of limbs each morning, when I am fallen
out of the world.

Here is the poet himself reading it

You can order the book directly from the publisher by clicking on the link above.

In the Dark