I am struggling with student engagement in all of my classes: poor attendance, poor participation, all those horribly negligent bugaboos that make it hard to teach. So here we are, halfway through the term almost, and I’m trying to shake things up.
I’m teaching a course titled “The History of Evolutionary Thought,” which is also a writing-enriched course — I’m expected to spend half the class time, approximately, teaching writing skills. I consider that permission to get experimental at times. This past week I lectured on the history of geology, Hutton through Lyell, so today I made them sit down and do a writing exercise.
We read poetry.
Can I do that in a science building, in a science course? You betcha. I did. I made them think about a poem about James Hutton. I gave them these instructions:
The idea of Deep Time inspired many writers, and some of them are poets. Today, I want you to write a paragraph on this poem. You can
• interpret some aspect of the poem
• write about the virtue of poetry to science
• explain how it makes you feel
• express your own ideas about Deep Time
• write your own poem!
And here’s the poem!
JAMES HUTTON LEARNS TO READ THE
HIEROGLYPHICS OF THE EARTH
by Ron Butlin
Woken once too often by the rattle-clatter
of tumbril wheels on cobbles, the click . . . click . . .
click of distant knitting needles,
James Hutton decided never to go
to sleep again.
Then, by the light of several Edinburgh Council moons
(spares, in case the heavens were taken over
by the church), he tip-toed past storm-wrecked
Holyrood Abbey, went striding down
unimagined corridors,
through undreamt-of walls and doors where
Scottish Hope would one day
be cemented into place
(the bars across its parliament windows
wooden, just in case).The Park . . . Salisbury Crags . . .
where several hundred million years ago,
the Earth had cracked itself wide open –
*
Detailed as a map of Man’s undiscovered self,
zigzag Time lies flat-packed,
for everyone to see . . .
Stacked magma, olivine, dolerite chilled to glass,
eternity crushed to lines of slowly
spelled-out hieroglyphics, and cut
in blood-red haematite.
. . . and Hutton sees it. He’s the first!First to know he walks upon an ancient ocean floor
(God’s Flood, the merest puddle in all that vastness).
First to hear the stone-hard heartbeat pound-pound-
pounding out Existence.
Elsewhere, Revolution has taken to the streets
with an accusation and a scream,
a guillotine-swish . . .
French clocks run backwards to Year One.
Sunday 23rd October 4,004 BC?
All in the blink of a biblical eye! says Hutton.
*
Meanwhile, you and I continue turning
on our axis to the tick . . .
tick . . . tick of Time that never
started Once upon a . . .
And will surely never, ever –
Ah, these strata, these infinities glimpsed between!
I made them ponder and write for 25 minutes, and then we had a discussion. I think it went well. They were wide awake, at least!
Next week, I’m talking about pre-Darwinian ideas about biological change. Maybe I should read them one of Erasmus Darwin’s poems? Or maybe not — they’re awfully suggestive, and I don’t want to end up like Joe Gow.
You’re an evil, devious man.
I wish I had been able to take that class.
Physics for Poets by Robert H. March
What, no Goethe?:
https://poems.com/poem/the-metamorphosis-of-the-plants/
You are quite lucky not to have had someone like me in your class.
I would have likely disrupted it and been sent off after I expressed my opinion.
—
“Meanwhile, you and I continue turning
on our axis to the tick . . .
tick . . . tick of Time that never
started Once upon a . . .
And will surely never, ever –”
Ah, yes, the ticks of Time — probably a bit like the Hounds of Tindalos.
They suck one’s remaining life away.
(Me, I’m not turning on my axis even a bit, and avoid the weeds of time where the ticks live)
John @5: I know you don’t appreciate poetry. Has it ever occurred to you that you’re just missing something that others find profound? As a tone-deaf person misses the profundity of music. Do you think those people are just fooling themselves? It’s as though you see a shortcoming as a virtue.
That’s exactly what people tell me about goddism, so perhaps I have a poetry-shaped hole in my soul.
What?
No more than people that like opera are fooling themselves.
(I hate opera with a passion)
To what supposed shortcoming do you intend to refer in that claim?
—
Still, the ticks of Time do amuse me somewhat.
(That, and the proliferation of spaced-out ellipses)
John @7: Just like theists come in so many flavors they always have someone to tell you that your objections don’t apply to their gods, there will be apologists who will tell you that your troubles with poetry don’t apply to their favorite poet. They’re both slippery subjects.
At least we can all see that poems are real. And that they were created. ;-)
I have trouble meshing with poetry. Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” is one I’ve been grappling with recently for ulterior literary reasons. Glad others can do the heavy lifting analyses to help me decipher meanings. Polysemy.
I kinda feel the “An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick” line more and more. Senescence.
In my area, we’re rather more concerned about the ticks of Lyme …
There seem to be a few subtle digs at god in the poem the class were required to read.
Not sure I would have done that.
graham2, but then, hieroglyphs are sacred carvings, and they’re treated as revelatory.
very good.
I used to think that the first four lines of Blake’s Auguries of Innocence were perfect and I greatly admire most of the rest of the poem but, alas, he drags ‘God’ into it. but…
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
submoron @13:
Poor old Blake, misunderstood by nearly everyone. The ‘God’ he drags in isn’t the one many people imagine;
His feelings about organized religion are also made quite clear in The Garden of Love.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45950/the-garden-of-love
In the olden days, Zod was often used as an allegory.
Like when Einstein said “Der Alte” does not play dice.
It is not automatically a sign of an author being a beleiver.
Having mentioned Einstein, I feel compelled to bring up those conservative chain-mails with a fictional classroom discussion where a professor (which we later learn is Einstein) gets convinced Zod is real and becomes a christian.
.
(Einstein was Jewish, which is why the art-school reject condemned modern physics as “jewish science” and lost the option of creating the atom bomb).
There’s an art to science and a science to art.
Oh and then there’s the poet of science – Carl Sagan. *
Of course, these things and aspect are complementary and be fused together, combined well
Of course, some poetry and lines from plays seem to make them appear hostile..
““There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet, William Shakespeare – https://poemanalysis.com/shakespeare-quotes/there-are-more-things-in-heaven-and-earth-horatio/)
… & that’s why we have scientists to investigate those more things, those unseen & undreamt of things like Black Holes and icy Pluto, like unknown lands full of newfound living things and wonders made of giant shfting slabs of stone pushed by molten stone rivers ..so unlike yet like unto the underground ocean in the shape of a heart beneath the frigid Plutonian landscape where water plays the role there that rock does here..
Also Walt Whitman’s When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer..
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45479/when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer
Whence I looked acroos and saw the learn’d astronomer standing there beside me eyes with special shine and awe aglow not just at the stellar beauty and wonder of them too but also with the knowing of what those stars each were, each of their stories, each of their lights and each of their true sizes, true heat and natures illuminated as not mere specks but plasma-toric places. Individuals of their own and countless worlds of suchj varied natures beside..
(Okay, I probly suck at writing poetry but hope yáll get the gist.)
Then there’s scientific limericks ..
There was a scientist from Nantucket,
Who invented this really great rocket…
.* Among so many other places especially his own books and words see :
<Blockquote In “Space, Time and the Poet” he explained, “It is an exhilarating experience to read poetry and observe its correlation with modern science.” In the article he comments on selections from the writings of Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, T. S. Elliot, Robert Frost and The Bible. After reviewing these poems and their harmony with scientific understanding of the cosmos, he closes by considering the place of humanity in the universe,
https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cosmos-with-carl-sagan/articles-and-essays/carl-sagan-and-the-tradition-of-science/sagans-youth-and-the-progressive-promise-of-space/
Perhaps I shoulda used “Plasmatorical” instead of “plasma-toric” as more poetic?
Echoing “phantasmagorical” or is that not a word as well as ‘phantasms’ not being a thing aside from contrivances in plays to catch the conscience of a king?
Specifically King Claudius of the Bard’s Danish play.
Rob Grigjanis @14. Of course! I forgot about that. How annoyed he’d be at the C of E high jacking Parry’s setting of ‘Jerusalem’.
birgerjohansson @15.Speer asserts that Lenard, the Nobel winner, persuaded Hitler about that.
Poetry at its best hits hard
“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!
–Emily Dickinson
BTW it seems James Clerk Maxwell of Maxwell’s equations wrote poetry
…
Here let me pause.—These transient facts,
These fugitive impressions,
Must be transformed by mental acts,
To permanent possessions.
Then summon up your grasp of mind,
Your fancy scientific,
Till sights and sounds with thought combine
Become of truth prolific.
Go to! prepare your mental bricks,
Fetch them from every quarter,
Firm on the sand your basement fix
With best sensation mortar.
The top shall rise to heaven on high—
Or such an elevation,
That the swift whirl with which we fly
Shall conquer gravitation.
submoron @18: If it hadn’t been hijacked, I probably wouldn’t know it, and it remains one of my favourite songs. So thanks, C of E!
And yet it moves.
———
I wonder how many students caught all the references to various historical/ revolutionary events?
The Dream of the Rood is rather obscure, and most Americans don’t learn much about Mary, Queen of Scots in High School, much less Holyrood Abbey.
Though the French Revolution is directly referenced a few times, I was not aware of the role of the Tricoteuse and their knitting needles. It alliterates well with tumbrils.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricoteuse
For poetry about evolutionary change I think you can do much worse than the Ballad of the Veliger (or how the Gastropod got its twist). The hypothesis may not be right and is presented in Lamarckian terms, but then that’s history for you. :)
IMO Nicolas Steno is a better choice than Hutton. And the students might be intrigued by The Seashell on the Mountaintop. I found it fascinating. In it I learned that before Steno fossilized seashells were thought to grow in the dirt. Steno’s Laws are still cited in geology. It also lays out clearly how religious dogma controlled science in the 1600s.
@Walter Solomon – just in the off-chance you haven’t seen this version of that song, from when the MP team reunited for a short series of live shows a decade ago – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTpBWhmamWo – Brian Cox and Stephen Hawking join in at the end of the song, and I can’t see it mentioned without immediately wanting to share the joy.
@katybe
I hadn’t seen that version. Thanks.