Poetic responses to the Copernican revolution

Sc Am ByA Ro AN Poetic Responses . var to the Copernican Revolution English poetry of the 17th century imaginatively reflected man’s new awareness of a vaster universe. Yet the poetic imagination was rooted in the past and in the end lost its place as a bridge to new knowledge by Margaret M. Byard nd new Philosophy cals all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no mans wit Can well direct him, where to looke for it. John Donne wrote those lines shortly after Galileo had trained his three-power telescope on Jupiter and found four bright moons circling the planet in a miniature model of the solar system, a discovery that lent credence to the Copernican hypothesis that the earth circled the sun and was therefore not the center of the universe. In 17th-century England, where men of rich imagination and language were equal to the occasion, the revolution begun by Copernicus and accelerated by Galileo inspired poetry in which the dismay expressed by Donne gradually gave way to exultation in the new universe of infinite space. The poets were not always precise about how the cosmos had been rearranged; they often invoked the old earth-centered Ptolemaic plan. Blended with such errors, however, was a new awareness of spaciousness, expressed in imagery that ranged across the cosmos, soaring into realms far beyond the celestial spheres in which the planets and the stars had hitherto been confined. The combination of the old and the new yielded poetry of a unique beauty pervaded by a sense of wonder and a singular freshness of vision. Intensely religious as they were, these poets found that the new concepts of the universe fulfilled their ideas of a deity of infinite power and creativity. To put oneself in the poet's place and to respond to his metaphors one must recall first the model of the universe he had inherited from the past and then the discoveries that burst open its boundaries and freed the tiny “punctual spot of earth” into a sea of stars. Until late in the 16th century the poet, like any other literate citizen, could think of himself as being the focus of a visible cosmos: Looking up at the heavens, he could see the moon circling the earth to illuminate it by night and the sun, that “busy old fool,” rising and setting to illuminate it by day. The planets, set like jewels in their celestial spheres, also obediently circled the earth, and beyond them, set in their own sphere, revolved the “fixed” stars visible to the unaided eye, stars that were perfect, unchanging, divinely numbered, placed there by God. Each planet and star had a role in man’s life and watched over his terrestrial affairs. Visible in the heavens but not included in the model was the Milky Way, explained by ancient myth as the copious output of Venus’ breasts. The regions below the moon were imperfect and subject to decay. Immediately below the moon was the region of fire, constantly aflame yet transparent. Below the region of fire were the regions of air, water and the solid earth. BATTLE IN HEAVEN in Milton’s Paradise Lost is conducted on several planes, Here the battle between Satan and God, as reenacted before Adam and Eve in Book VI, is portrayed in the first illustrated edition of the work published in 1688. According to the argument at the beginning of Book VI, “God on the third day sends Messiah his Son, for whom he had r vd the glory of... Victory: He in the Power of his Father coming to the place [of battle], and causing ail his Legions to stand still on either side, with his Chariot and Thunder driving into the midst of his Enemies, pursues them unable to resist towards the wall of Heaven; which opeuing, they leap down with horrour and confusion into the place of punishment prepar’d for them in the Deep.” Although Miitows message in Paradise Lost was theological and political, the awareness of space that was brought about by the revolutionary cosmology of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo gave him a vast arena for bis account of struggle between good and evil, Of primary importance was the interconnectedness of the plan. Man's body was made up of the four elements fire, air, water and earth and was regulated by the fixed stars. Since before the time of Plato it had been believed the world had a soul like man's own. Man's form and proportions were a pattern for all structure, including the structure of the universe. [ee this compact ancient model broke a brilliant new star in 1572 (Tycho's nova), a great comet in 1577 and another brilliant new star in 1604 (Kepler's nova). These events were a disaster to literal believers in the ancient cosmology but a liberation for those mathematician-astronomers who for centuries had been struggling to reconcile fantasy and observation. The evidence accumulated. Copernicus had published his finding of the sun’s centrality in 1543, but there was no telescope to help prove his assertion. Working with ambitious but inadequate medieval instruments,’ Tycho Brahe calculated that the visible planets revolved around the sun. By determined ingenuity, however, he demonstrated thai the sun, along with the planets, circled the earth. Johannes Kepler further ruined the comfortable old pattern of perfection by showing that the planets traveled around the sun in elliptical paths. He retained the ancient notion of the music of the spheres, but the complicated orbits meant that each planet contributed a full melody to the heavenly sound rather than a single tone. Galileo and his irrefutable observations doomed the old earth-centered cosmology. He announced that the sun is indeed central and the earth is its satellite, and not even the principal one. Moreover, through his “optic glass” the mysterious milk of Venus was seen to consist of faint stars in uncountable millions. Gradually the new ideas diffused throughout Europe. They arrived in England at a time—the time of Shake121

speare—when poetic expression in the English language was at a peak never attained before or since. The poetic tradition was also strong: as one of a long line descended from David and Orpheus the poet could still write as an interpreter of the truths of nature. The Poly-Olbion (1612) of Michael Drayton is a gazetteer of England in vérse form; The Purple Island (1633) of Phineas Fletcher is an anatomy of the body in archaic terms; Democritus Platonissans (1646) of Henry More is a faithful description of the Copernican solar system embedded in à “Pl=tonic” poem. It was almost as if the writers had to veil their knowledge . in a cloud of poetry. Where the Latin letters and treatises of Kepler, Galileo and their successors were addressed to astronomers and mathematicians. the poets spoke in sn English to the wider circle of 122 growing awareness of a larger universe, posed of. Galileo, Donne says, “of late hath summoned the other worlds, the of space and of infinity. Yet at the same time they retained the outlook of the old cosmology: man was still the center of things bound in a close relation with the planets and the stars. Stars, to come neerer to him, and give him an account of themselves... Kepler...ever since Tycho Braches death hath received it into his care, that no new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge.” Even Donne's love poems are alive with imagery of suns, moons and stars. It cannot be said of these poems that Donne was entering the mysteries of a newly discovered cosmos; his imagery is almost always Ptolemaic. He is unique, however, in complimenting the women he celebrates with cosmic references. They must have been puzzled (“perplexed," said Dryden) by some of his mind-stretching comparisons. In “Elegie: Going to Bed” the lady’s belt, as he removes it in exploring “my America! my new-found-land,” is the zone of Orion. In “A Valediction of Weeping” each milk. sense” explanation of the nature of the Milky Way based on ancient Greek myth: the luminous track seen across the sky was Venus’ he canon of space poetry, defined 40 years ago by the literary historian Marjorie Hope Nicolson, begins with Donne. In his “worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages,” he was associated with the learned university men of his day. Thomas Hariot, the English astronomer who was one of the first to use the telescope, can be connected with Donne through mutual friends and associates. Evidence of Donne's scientific sophistication comes from Ignatius his Conclave, a satire that describes an imaginary descent to hell, where “innovators” such as Galileo and Kepler are dis- “THE ORIGIN OF THE MILKY WAY,” painted in the 16th century by Tintovetto (1518-94), portrays a pre-Galilean “common of his lover’s tears as she weeps at their parting is like a globe or a new world. “O more then Moone,” he calls her in the next stanza; the moon can only influence the tides but she creates tides in which he drowns. In the poems Donne wrote for the great ladies who were his patronesses there is no mistaking cosmic hyperbole. The Countess of Bedford changes the entire celestial order; her brightness is such that she creates a new day, a new night, a new cosmos: Out from your chariot, morning breaks at night, And falsifies both computations so; Since a new world doth rise here from your light, We your new creatures, by new recknings goe. The Countess of Huntingdon, who shuns great titles, has been taught modesty by the constellations themselves, the greatest of which have taken modest names such as the Crab (Cancer) or the Bull (Taurus). How very different it is from the conventional compliments to which the dedicatees were accustomed: the beamy eyes, the sweet, swelling, sugared lips, the brows like Cupid's bows that Philip Sidney gave his Stella. ater Donne's attitudes were to shift away from the easy commandeering of stars and moons as ornaments for his mistresses and patronesses. In his religious poetry, written as he was on his way to another life as the greatest preacher of his age, he spans aeons and immeasurable distances. In the most familiar of his Holy Sonnets Donne equates himself and the world: “I am a little world made cunningly / of Elements, and an Angeiike spright.” Less noticed are the next lines, in which he says that Christ is a discoverer who “beyond that heaven which was most high” has “found new sphears, and of new lands can write.” Those are remarkable lines. In them Donne was admitting that heaven was most high and yet that there might be new spheres beyond the closed traditional world. Could he have been thinking of the infinity of worlds that had become a stronger possibility because of Galileo? Donne's “The First Anniversarie” (1611) and “Of the Progres of the Soule” (1612) are laments for a dying world and a dying cosmology. In them one finds the dismay that was generally being experienced over what Nicolson called “the breaking of the circle,” the demise of the Ptolemaic system. And freely men confesse, that this world’s spent, When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seeke so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out againe to’his Atomis. ‘Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone.... Donne felt that the new science tears sheeres, The Firmament in eight and fortie And in those constellations there arise New starres, and old do vanish from our eyes: As though heav'n suffred earth-quakes, peace or war, When new Townes rise, and olde demolish’d are. Astronomers have “empayld within a Zodiake / The free-borne Sunne.” Everything in the arrangement of the heavens is uncertain. No longer can one know when sun or stars will rise, ...nor can the Sunne Perfit a Circle, or maintaine his way One inche direct; but where he rose to day He comes no more, but with a cousening line, Steales by that point, and so is Serpentine: And seeming weary with his reeling thus, He meanes to sleepe, being now falne nearer us. So, of the Starres which boast that they do runne In Circle still, none ends where he begunne. All their proportion’s lame, it sinks, it swels. The two poems are an interweaving of the old and the new. At the same time that they lament the old model of the universe, they carry the reader out toward the uncertain boundaries of space. However regretful Donne may be, his imaginätion has been loosed from the “little world.” Yet he strongly retains the old close relation of man with the sun and the stars, writing of the celestial bodies as fellow sufferers in disintegration. Anthropomorphism, animism and the pathetic failacy have here their most convincing and most moving expression: For of Meridians, and Parallels, Man hath weav’d out a net, and this net throwne Upon the Heavens, and now they are his owne. George Herbert, a younger contemporary of Donne and perhaps the greatest of English religious poets, also laments and dreads the vast universe. In the few short lines of “The Temper” (1633) he soars from the greatest heights above the earth to the limitless depths below, down into the unknown region of hell. It is notable that in the following lines heaven is not only receding but also multiplied, a change in con- DIAGRAM OF A VORTEX, by which Desinued to keep the planets moving in their i 3 orbital motion un, is found in the et Honey More for his Phi Il Poems, published in 1647, In older the universe the vortex was a hypethetical retary movement of cosmie matter around à cent "an axis, : pent that allowed the solar 5 a to form and nican syse references, mooi. More’s poem “Democritus Platonisorbits, More describes the illustration: “CDBE Vortex, in which, and by which are carried from West to East, according to the order of CDBE. Let A be the Sun, the Center of this great Vortex.” Point F marks the earth, which is circled by the sans” praises the glories of C tem and has many astronom ception that might not have occurred without new views of the structure of the universe: Although there were some fourtie heav'ns, or more, Sometimes | peere above them all; Sometimes I hardly reach a score, Sometimes to hell I fall. O rack me not to such a vast extent; Those distances belong to thee: The world’s too little for thy tent, A grave too big for me. Yet unlike Donne, Herbert exults in the spacious universe he portrays, even as he retains the old sense of man's role in it and kinship with it. In his poem “Man” he writes: “The starres have us to bed; / Night draws the curtain, which the sunne withdraws.” There are cupboards and cabinets in his outer space as there are in the library or study where the 17th-century collector kept his treasures: 123 Nothing hath got so farre, But Man hath caught and kept it, as his prey. His eyes dismount the highest starre: He is in little all the sphere. Herbs gladly cure our flesh; because that they Finde their acquaintance there. For us the windes do blow,

old and Mondes (t Menus. jLaTerre.s Mars. was then known, on a draped theatrical curtain, The ant version of the solar system is correctly drawn, to solar sys me the extent dat own el is accompanied by surrounded by stars, each of which by the face 6 of planets; each star, however, 15 represented The earth doth rest, heav'n move, and fountains flow. Nothing we see, but means our good. As our delight, or as our treasure: The whole is, either our cupboard of food, Or cabinet of pleasure. Herbert also brings the new cosmos and man together in an almost cozy relationship, in keeping with his sense of the unity of all things. We are made to walk (or fly) with him as he imagines the work of the astronomer: The fleet Astronomer can bore, And thred the spheres with his quick-piercing minde: He views their stations, walks from doore to doore, Surveys, as if he had design'd To make a purchase there: he sees their dances, And knoweth long before Both their full-ey'd aspects. and secret glances. In “The Agonie” Herbert sees the power of the scientist to stride through the heavens: Philosophers have measur'd mountains, Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings, Walk'd with a staffe to heav’n. and traced fountains. The same kind of imagination and exultation can be found in the religious poetry of Richard Crashaw, probably written in the 1640's. Crashaw, the most baroque of the English poets, seems as much at home in an outer world of stars and planets as Herbert is: Drest in the glorious madnesse of a Muse Whose feet can walke the milky way.. Crashaw conveys a sense of space by describing the flight of the soul into a cloudy realm of the skies to meet the greatest of symbols, the name of Jesus: Goe, Sour, out of thy Self, and seek for More. Goe and request Great NATURE for the Key of her huge Chest Of Heavns, the self involving Sett of Sphears (Which dull mortality more Feeles then heares) Then rouse the nest Of nimble ART, and traverse round The Aiery Shop of soul-appeasing Sound.... Crashaw establishes a world in his heavens that he imagines even as to the feel of the clouds and the sounds that he hears: music is omnipresent: Come, nere to part. NATURE and ART! Come: and come strong, To the conspiracy of our Spatious song. Bring All the Powres of Praise Your Provinces of well-united WORLDS can raise: Bring All your Lutes and Harps of HEAVN and EARTH: What e're cooperates to The common mirthe Vessells of vocall Joyes, Or You, more noble Architects of Intellectuall Noise, Cymballs of Heav'n, or Humane sphears, Solliciters of SOULES or Eares.. Is Crashaw intimating here that sound is involved in the sensation of space and that we lose our spatial orientation when sound is absent? The discomfort of a soundproof room bears out Crashaw's intuition and Milton’s more complex use of sound and imitations of it in Paradise Lost. In “The Weeper” Crashaw celebrates Mary Magdalene, repentant sinner of the Gospels, whose tears become stars: Heavens thy fair eyes be; Heavens of ever-falling starres. ‘Tis seed-time still with thee And starres thou sow’st, whose harvest dares Promise the earth to counter shine Whatever makes heavn's forhead fine. In the fourth stanza her tears not only drop down but also fly up: Upwards thou dost weep. Heavn’s bosome drinks the gentle stream. Where th'milky rivers creep, Thine floates above; and is the cream. Waters above th’Heavns, what they be We'are taught best by thy TEARES and thee. T brush the starres and make them shine more bright. Then all the works of God with close embrace I dearly hug in my enlarged arms.... Cupid, here the god of Platonic love, is given powers that strain the imagination. Elsewhere More endowed spi and angels, in which he earnestly believed, à similar attributes, including extension in space and “essential spissitude” (which can be defined as viscosity). In a quite different vein More's Deritus Platonissans accurately describes the.,Copernican solar system with copious notes and diagrams to clarify his lines. The most informed and scientific of all the poets, More was unfortunately the least inspired: tedious and long-winded, he is often insuperably hard to read. One difficulty is that he wrote many of his poems in the ornate Spenserian stanza and employed archaic language that was outmoded even in the time of Spenser himself. Yet More must have realized that in order to be widely read by the literate public it was best to write in the respected medium of poctry, and that Copernicanism was more easily accepted in stanzas such as these: The Centre of our world s the lively light Of the warm sunne, the visible Deity Of this externall Temple. Mercurie Next plac'd and warm'd more thoroughly by his rayes, Right nimbly ‘bout his golden head doth fly: Then Venus nothing slow about him strayes And next our Earth though seeming sad full sprightly playes. ..so our worlds sunne Becomes a starre elsewhere, and doth derive Joynt light with others, cheareth all that won In those dim duskish Orbs round other suns that run. How tantalizingly close the poet comes to the concept of gravity before Isaac Newton's discovery of it in 1682! He intuitively senses a force called then by many names: God, angels, vortices, the “primum mobile.” More seems to have in mind a propulsion generated And in the heavens. that indefinable stellar region, the tears become the wine for the souls of the dead who live there: When some new bright Guest Takes up among the starres a room, And Heavn will make a feast, Angels with crystall violls come And draw from these full eyes of thine Their master’s Water: their own Wine. bines, or rather bends, his knowledge of the way planets actually move to suit mythology: Mercury nimbly flies as he always flew as the messenger of the though her orbit as a planet is one of the as she strayed in her amours, even gods; Venus strays about the warm sun within the planets themselves; he com- Even as Crashaw was in nature's “aiery shop,” Henry More, philosopher and poet of Cambridge, wrote that Cupid could hug the universe in his arms: My mightie wings high stretch'd then clapping light

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D BOOK ONE O BOOK TWO OBOOK THREE For shipment outside U.S. add 75¢ each N Name Address. | Zip. City. Residents of New York City please add State city sales tax. Other NYS residents L please add state sales tax pius local tax. 126 most circular. In the last two lines More specifically recognizes that man may not be alone in space. (The word “won” is to be read as “live” or “dwell.”) [ss extravagant than Crashaw and less scientific than More were two modest clergyman-poets, Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne. In the course of their religious meditations they wrote verses that ranged far into the “Eternity” that Vaughan saw “the other night”: Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time in hours. days, years Driv'n by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov’d, In which the world And all her train were hurl'd. Both Vaughan and Traherne were Oxford men and therefore part of the small coterie of intellectuals of their day. Traherne specifically wrote that while he was at Oxford he studied “the secrets of nature with Albertus Magnus. the motions of the Heavens with Galileo, or the cosmography of the moon with Hevelius.” Almost every poem of Vaughan's Silex Scintillans (Sparks from a Flint), published in 1650 and 1655, is lighted by imagery of stars, those “fair, order'd lights” that “wind, and curle, and wink and smile,” and by “the new worlds new, quickning Sun.” (In the 17th century “world” meant an entire system, Ptolemaic or Copernican; “earth” meant only our planet.) Traherne ranged further still. He imagined that the “Earth, the Seas, the Light, the Day, the Skies, / The Sun and Stars” were his as he speculated “neverendingly about eternity and infinity.” He claims “new Worlds” as part of the realm of the God he is praising: ‘Tis mean Ambition to desire A single World: To many I aspire, Tho one upon another hurl'd: Nor will they all, if they be all confin'd, Delight my Mind. This busy, vast, enquiring Soul Brooks no Controul: ‘Tis very curious too. Each one of all those Worlds must be Enricht with infinit Variety And Worth; or ‘twill not do. Traherne's “Consummation” is an awkward but adventurous projection of infinity: The Thoughts of Men appear Freely to mov within a Sphere Of endless Reach: and run. Tho in the Soul, beyond the Sun. The Ground on which they acted be Is unobserv’d Infinity. Traversing throu the Sky, Tho here, beyond it far they Ay: Abiding in the Mind An endless Liberty they find: Throu-out all Spaces can extend. Nor ever meet or know an End. Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne were all lyric singers of space. John Milton was the epic voice. With Paradise Lost there comes into existence another—and perhaps the greatest—cosmic vision of the age. Later critics have worried because Milton was a “reluctant Copernican” and did not leave the old cosmology behind. The biblical Ptolemaic scheme is his framework. One can see why: Milton needed the old system to assert his moral. Man had to be central in a central earth so that he could be the focus of the scheme of things. Moreover, because of his God-given freedom of choice, he was responsible for the good and the evil on earth. Nevertheless, Milton's vision of the cosmos is unconfined in space and time. He projects the universe of his epic through violent contrasts of light and dark, in crescendos and decrescendos of sound. through HEAVEN 32 > go TZ D> gz action, through flight backward in time as well as forward. The entire epic represented by Paradise Lost can be outlined in a succession of flights across a three-sphere universe consisting of heaven, earth and hell. Satan is the first to experience the vastness of the universe. As he looks out from the gates of hell before beginning his flight to earth, even he is terrified by what he sces. Accompanied by Sin, his paramour, and by Neath. his child. he gazes Out into chaos: Before thir eyes in sudden view appear The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark Ulimitable Ocean without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth, | And time and place are lost.... With angels’ weightlessness, he resumes his flight. But even he is subject to air pockets: At last his Sail-bro ad Vans He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoak 7 Uplifted spurns the ground, thence many a League As in a cloudy Chair ascending rides Audacious, but that seat soon failing, mects A vast vac Fluttring his pennons vain plumb down he drops Ten thousand fadom deep. and to this hour Down had been falling, had not by ill chance The strong rebuff of som tumultuous cloud Instinct with Fire and Nitre hurried him As many miles aloît. Soon he sees “this pendant world” in the distance—vulnerable, defenseless, “a Starr of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.” His flight toward it is difficult. He labors: So eagerly the fiend Ore bog or steep, through strait, rough. dense, or rare, u With head, hands, wings or feet pursues his way, And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flyes.... RAPHAEL IN BOOKS vil AND VI RETROSPECT TAN X, 325-349 MEET ADISE: x, 585 AND EVE ly seen it from the moon, are all imazinable from Milton's lines. As a counteraction to Satan's flight Raphael. the sociable angel, flies from heaven to earth to warn Adam and Eve of Satan's coming, In a complex play with the sequence of time Raphael takes Adam and Eve through the history of the universe before their own creation . The battle in heaven is projected before them: Satan and his Olympians alien themselves against God and the angels and archangels. Mountains are hurled against mountains: heaven seems to return to the chaos below it. But Satan and his rebellious angels are defeated and are hurled out into space down to hell. To replace Satan and his followers the earth is created. From the distance of a star, through the vast sweep and action of Milton's lines, we watch with Adam and Eve as the universe is created. The earth was formed on the third day and the sun, the moon and the stars on the fourth: BOOK XI VISION OF BOOK Xi PARADISE FROM OE THE FUTURE (TO COMING FUTURE (TO FLOOD) | | OF CHRIST). DEPARTURE OF ADAM AND EVE oe at For of Celestial Bodies first the Sun A mightie Sphear he fram'd, unlightsom first, Though of Ethereal Mould: then form'd the Moon Globose, and every magnitude of Starrs. o 8 books are diagrammed. Pertinent passages are identified by book and line number. Illustration is based on work of Mary Hoskinsou, 88 sk alZ Efe) Fi 2 © aZe x QUENCES Then he “springs upward like a Pyramid of fire” and finally, with “Shrouds and Tackle torn.” lands on earth. Satan as a launching rocket and a floating astronaut, and the earth as we have recent- BOOK ll SATAN BOOKS V AND VI RETROSPECT (WAR IN HEAVEN) qm (CREATION OF THE WORLD) SATAN, 181 PARADISE ARRIVES LY OUT OF HELL. BUILD A ° CAUSEWAY: X. 282-324 backward and forward in time. Here the flights of Satan, Christ and angels between heaven, earth and hell described in cach of the 12 ARRIVE IN PA > ze DAS SIN AND AT OUTER | 4 PARADIS WORLD, 422 | \ 7 & Cy & 42 a2 ir Abs ËEARTH úGm © HELL BOOK Il BOOK | SATAN AND | | CONSULT IN PANDAEHIS HOSTS MONIUM FLIGHTS IN “PARADISE LOST” carry the action across vast reaches of space and both

In fact, you didn’t need much of anything except a willingness to work 16 hours a day. For 8¢ an hour. Under brutal conditions. But times have changed drastically. Life for the working man is more And sowd with Starrs the Heav'n thick as a field.... challenging. Safer. More stimulating. And far more rewarding. Why? Many things have helped. Especially an endless flow of technological improvements and discoveries. Many of which came from college campuses, and from colleve-trained men and women. We must sustain this flow of ideas, Only in this way, can we increase the productivity that will maintain and increase our standard of living. America’s colleges need your help. They are in deep financial trouble. GIVE TO THE COLLEGE OF YOUR CHOICE. NOW. sg Councıl for Financial Aid 10 Education, Inc. 81 680 Filth Avenue, New York. N.Y. 10019 ABE Aal A Public Service Of This Mazazine And Council The Advertising Council. There is a rising crescendo of action and sound up to the seventh day, when the completion of the.universe is celebrated. The music of the spheres—of the stars, of the planets, of the angels— rings, resounds and echoes throughout the new creation. After the vision we are returned ta Adam and Eve's present. Inevitakly they are corrupted. As a result of their symbolic act of eating the apple from the tree of knowledge the entire universe changes convulsively. In a rearrangement of the cosmos the action is speeded up in a chaotic series of fights between heaven, hell and earth. The last scenes of the epic are earth-centered. Adam and Eve. now mere human beings, are expelled from the Garden of Eden. The choice of good or evil is up to them and their descendants. The end of the epic is overwhelming. The visions of space and time, the cosmic flights are over. We are landed squarely on earth. he intoxication with space that appears in England's poetry set painters of the baroque period on equally ambitious voyages beyond the sky. Guercino (1591-1666) and others show action » FURAITURE + WROUGHT-IRON MASONRY + AUTOS AHD BOATS + HUNDNEDS OF OTHER JOOS! ay “es ANRACLE FINGE À oi new space age carbon steet alloy À BOATS (HG, toes alt 8 4 F on of the time8 SJ STOPS AUST DEAD, stays rusten spots down lo tne vase metal last’ Cleans masonry and swim pools e/rostiessiy UE Provides a twofold Leaves à satin Smoot nsi. revelation— about the beauty and grandeur of the L Made in America 7 FULL INSTRUC HUN S INCLUDED yt Haus Ir as u un m mw um RUSH ORDER COUPON ce me un ze mug B Roro STRIPPER (Dept. 933) i] a 43 Riverside Ave. « Westport, CT 06080 i Pease rush ROTD STRIPPERS Order : 51295 ea. quo lor £2395. Sorry. ODcoanse to ag isos | N B no CODs. Auw $1, nansıng tor each. COPINE tor furniture. g ~ L'anctose : $______ Charge: Ban, Americans a Master Charge i a Cara sa q ‘PLEASE PRINT to ae 1 A Name a B scores CET a ü PS Sen mu mu zu mm :00 APPLICABLE SALES TAX Gm um mm mm al 128 universe, and about the brilliance and tenacity of the human minds that occupy an obscure corner of that universe."— From the Introduction by Carl Sagan illustrated with photographs A BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB ALTERNATE SELECTION $10.00 gf WILLIAM MORROW EE in space and time that could only have occurred to them after the confines of the old model of the cosmos had been split open. In the painting “Aurora” Guercino has gods, chariots and horses thundering across the sky in an immense ceiling painting that lifts the viewer out of his dimensions and compels him to join the flight of the gods above him. In “Divine Wisdom,” painted by Andrea Sacchi at the Barberini Palace in Rome between 1629 and 1633, the carth floats in space. In “Adoration of the Name of Jesus,” painted by Giovanni Battista Gaulli (“Il Bacieció”) in a church in Rome between 1672 and 1685 angels and sacred personages fly upward in an explosion of wings and draperies. It is remarkable how many artists in the three centuries since Milton's death have been inspired by Paradise Lost— more, perhaps, than by any other work except for Dante's Divine Comedy. Almost all of them, including the 19th-century illustrators Gustave Doré and John Martin, try to give their impression of the vastness of the poem. In our own day Milton's descriptions have even been translated into film: Sergei Eisenstein modeled the battle scenes of Alexander Nevsky on Milton's war in heaven, John Collier has attempted to present the action of the poem in Milton's Paradise Lost: Screenplay for the Cinema of the Mind. After 1660, with the founding of the Royal Society of London as an arbiter of both science and literature, there came a change in attitude toward poets and poetry. Thomas Sprat, the historian hmm of the Royal Society, proclaimed that all writing leaning heavily on metaphorical language—the language of “fancy” and imagination—could be a barrier to truth. He advocated a “close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses; a native easiness; bringing all things...near Mathematical plainness.” He placed “the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that of Wits, or Scholars.” By “wits” Sprat particularly meant poets, with their delight in analogy as a way of describing relations between man and the cosmos. His attack suggests he was afraid of the poet's influence over men’s minds—"“bewitching,” he called it. His diatribe carries all the fervor of an attack on the communications media today. By the end of the 17th century the poet could no longer write with quite the same belief in himself as a prophet and a seer into the nature of things; intuition had increasingly to give way to the revolution in scientific knowledge that was to follow. hese old poets, to use the words of Sir Thomas Browne, were “true amphibia” that lived in “divided and distinguished worlds.” What is always renewing in their poems is their sense of the marvelous. There is a freshnes: in Andrew Marvell's wonder at “Stars [that] shew lovely in the Night, / But as they seem the Tears of Light”: we find it also in Traherne’s “On Leaping over the Moon,” where he sees new worlds mirrored in a pool of water. To Traherne the entire universe was a world of treasure and man was its temple of infinity. To find such poetry, which transcends time and knowledge, one has to go back to before the 1660's. Yet the relatedness of all things that the poet celebrated was no mere projection of his “fancy.” Today the ancient elements—fire, air, water and earth—have yielded to the # and d quarks, the electron and the electron neutrino as the components of all matter. “These four particles,” writes Sheldon Lee Glashow, “are the only ones needed to construct the world: they are sufficient to build all atoms and molecules, and even to keep the sun and other stars shining” [see “Quarks with Color and Flavor"; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, October, 1975]. In principle the poet's intuition was right. Even more important, to understand the universe opened up beyond the reach of our senses and of our common sense, and to make that universe our own, we still rely on the poet’s devices of the analogy, the simile, the hyperbole. The animistic, anthropomorphic world invoked by poetic imagery helps to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and the layman's comprehension. We continue to learn about the rest of the world through reference to ourselves and our common everyday experience. To preserve SCIENTIFIC your copies of Aun rıcan A choice of handsome and durable library files—or binders— for your copies of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Both styles bound in dark green library fabric stamped in gold leaf. Files Each file holds 12 issues. Price per file $4.95; three for $14.00; six for $24.00, postpaid. (Add $1.00 euch outside U.S.A.) Binders Each binder holds 12 issues. Issues open flat. Price per binder $6.50; three for $18.75; six for $36.00, postpaid. (Add $1.00 each outside U.S.A.) PO TTT 60 YEARS AGO, YOU DN'T NEED A COLLEGE EDUCATION To: Jesse Jones Box Corp. P.O. Box 5120, Philadelphia, Pa. 19141 I enclose my check or money order for $ SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN [) Files. . Please send me C) Binders. | | | (please print) | | | le | | | | binder NOTE: Satisfaction guaranteed or money refunded. 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