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 @telescoperMost 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)
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 @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.
Follow @telescoperMove him into the sun–
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it awoke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds–
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved,–still warm,–too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
–O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Follow @telescoperThere’s not a Shakespeare sonnet
Or a Beethoven quartet
That’s easier to like than you
Or harder to forget.
You think that sounds extravagant?
I haven’t finished yet –
I like you more than I would like
To have a cigarette.
by Wendy Cope (b. 1945).
Follow @telescoperNature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Follow @telescoperArt thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever-changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).
Follow @telescoperNow you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.
But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you’ve worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love.
How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.
by Dana Gioia (b. 1950).
Follow @telescoperNever let me lose the marvel
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent
the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.
I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.
If you are my hidden treasure,
if you are my cross, my dampened pain,
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,
never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.
by Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936).
This poem is from a collection called Sonetos del amor oscuro (“Sonnets of Dark Love”), which contains the last verses ever written by Lorca. They were written to a young man, with whom the poet had a secret love affair, whose identity remained unknown until earlier this year (2012) when letters and other documents were found which revealed him to be the (then) 19-year old Juan Ramírez de Lucas.
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In the Dark 