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Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner

18 October 2024

Reading Darwin and Tennyson shows Malcolm Guite that the arts and sciences go together

WHILE I was in Oklahoma City, I had a chance to visit the collection of rare books in the university there, in the company of Kerry Magruder, who looks after the world’s finest collections of books on the history of science. There were early printings of the works of Aristotle, first editions of Galileo, with his own annotations in the margins, and a wonderful collection of beautifully illustrated 16th-century herbals.

There was also a collection on Darwin, including the exquisitely illustrated The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. The exhibition was there to illustrate how deeply intertwined the arts and the sciences once were, and what a loss to both disciplines their separation has been.

One of the most poignant of the items on display was a passage from Darwin’s autobiography, in which he lamented the gradual loss of his taste for poetry, and, with it, a kind of atrophy of his imagination, until he could observe and tabulate but no longer see the beauty and meaning of what he studied: “Up to the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure . . . but now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. . . My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. . . If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”

Darwin was not alone in experiencing this atrophy of imagination, and science itself was impoverished by its over-emphasis on analytic reason. I remember, in all the celebrations of Darwin in 2009, the centenary of his birth, wishing that we had celebrated the other centenary of that year, that of Tennyson, alongside Darwin. They were students together at Cambridge, and Tennyson brought the full poetic imagination to bear on both the marvellous and the disturbing elements of the work of scientists such as Darwin. His In Memoriam was, in fact, published before On the Origin of Species, but it was already wrestling with the issues that Darwin’s book would raise:


Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life.


In that wrestling, Tennyson does not turn aside from science, but continually seeks for meaning through and beyond it. He rouses and summons just that awe and reverence that Darwin lamented he was losing:


Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before.


It was the poetic imagination that brought not only wonder at the discoveries of science, but also humility about how far any theory, any scientific system, can capture the resonant mystery of the cosmos in which we find ourselves — a mystery that is always transcending the limits of our minds:


Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

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