After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics
If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so's,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.
Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.
Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.
Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidian space:
Exploded myths - but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?
This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.
It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude's extremes
Really become a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.
Commentary
Note: As the son of a physicist, Auden had an enduring interest in science and the moral issues surrounding it.
– http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/poetry/outloud/auden.shtml
I could not resist a poem called ‘After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics’. Never read a poem like this before - that compared one’s life to the way it would be if one was a nebula or one were an atom. (BTW can a nebula or an atom have an identity? So ‘one’ in the sense of ‘me’ could never be a nebula right? Anyway. ) The first time I read the poem I couldn’t stop grinning at consequences of the lovers kiss. And the lines ‘but who/ Could feel at home astraddle/ An ever expanding saddle?’ totally grabbed me. They are just too cool - the idea of some astronomical body feeling uncomfortable because it was being stretched as the universe expanded was a nice quirky way to think of the big bang theory. Wish he had taken a shot at some more science theories - Darwinism would have been interesting I think.
Regards,
Zenobia D. Driver
Links
Auden’s reading of the poem here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/poetry/outloud/auden.shtml
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Alan Kornheiser · 6 February 2004
Dear Martin,
You published this extremely minor Auden and not any of Updike’s scientific romances? Shame on you. Well, not really, since I hadn’t known the poem and any Auden is better than no Auden, and I’m not volunteering to dig out my old Updike and in fact I find them too cute by half…but still.
Alan Kornheiser
Who just wanted you to know that someone is paying attention