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Figure 1`: Last [pril i photographed a small piece of Comet Thatcher
(C/1861 G1),. These fragments encounter the Earth's orbit annually
as the Lyrid meteor shower. Tennyson might have seen this comet, but
he certainly saw the next one which appeared as the ZGreat Comet of
1861. |
.Skyward for December 2019
When poetry reaches the stars.
Long, long ago, when I was as student at Acadia University
in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, we studied the poems of Alfred, Lord
Tennyson. The English 360 course was
taught by one of my favorite professors, Roger Lewis. Tennyson remains one of the truly great
English poets, and even in his lifetime he knew that. In 1850, upon the death of William
Wordsworth, he was appointed poet laureate by Queen Victoria. In that same year he published In
Memoriam, arguably his greatest work.
More than a poet, Tennyson enriched
his life with a passionate interest in science, particularly the night
sky. Did he own a telescope? He surely did. Although he used it often, particularly from
his home on the Isle of Wight, he often enjoyed the use of big refractor
telescopes in England. He viewed some of
the great comets of his time, like Donati in 1858 and Tebutt in 1861. He also noticed the discovery of Neptune
in 1846. Not only was he aware of these
developments, but he also incorporated them into one of the greatest poems ever
written, the epic called In Memoriam.
In Memoriam grew out of
Tennyson’s profound loss when his best friend, Arthur Hallam, died suddenly and
unexpectedly in 1831. His grief evolved
into several quatrains of poetry, then many, and he completed the work in 1850. But this poem is far more than an elegy. He framed it as a massive commentary on the
progress of science during his time, particularly with regard to organic
evolution and astronomy. From its dramatic
opening line “Strong son of God, immortal love,” he delves into what the great telescopes of
his time could reveal as
“Nature stretches forth her arms, and gleans
Her secret from the latest moon?” (CXX)
Passing over his wonderful praise of Darwin’s theory of
evolution and natural selection…
“And let the ape and tiger die.” …
we encounter the epic’s truly powerful ending. To write that it is like a bald eagle about
to soar in flight is just insufficient. Like a gigantic Saturn 5 as it roars
off its launch complex to the Moon, the last two stanzas germinate, then erupt
in a fiery tribute to creation itself.
The poem closes with a return to
Hallam: “That fiend of mine who lives in God,” …
Tennyson then specifies God as being immortal and loving;
“That God, which ever lives and loves,”
…
And then he defines the Universe as an ordered realm with a specific goal: “One God,
one law, one element”. In that one line
Tennyspon summarizes the purpose of In Memoriam as a statement about the
interplay between science and religion.
Finally, Tennyson predicts a goal for the Universe:
“and one far-off divine event”
In Tennyson’s time that goal was
not understood. But a century later, understanding of Hubble’s
constant opened the great question as to whether the Universe will end in a
“big crunch” in which the Universe is condensed into a single point as it was
13.7 billion years ago. The other possibility is that the universe will
continue to expand forever. It is one of
these two faroff events
“To which the whole creation
moves. And thus, we reach the close of
In Memoriam as it moves proudly among the stars:
That friend of mine, who lives in God,
That God, who ever lives and loves,
One
God, one law, one element,
And one
far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
