Today’s Poem: Science and Poetry

William Blake and the Doctrine of Double Truth

William Blake’s Ancient of Days (Wikimedia Commons)

“The Atoms of Democritus / And Newton’s Particles of light / Are sands upon the Red sea shore / Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright,” William Blake (1757–1827) declared in “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” a poem routinely taken as his rejection of science and Enlightenment reason.

It it, though? The relation of science and poetry is a curious one. Often enough, poets seem to say that the scientific view must be excluded — rejected or ignored — for poetry to live. In “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” for example Walt Whitman (1819–1892), listening to an astronomy lecture, finds himself becoming “tired and sick.” And fleeing outside, he recovers in “the mystical moist night-air” by looking up “in perfect silence at the stars.” The stars in their truth are perceived by the poet, not the scientist.

Or Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), who in his “Sonnet — To Science” takes what would become a standard humanist view of the richness of ancient symbols bankrupted by modernity, with science as one of the modern age’s tools of disenchantment (see our earlier discussions here in Poems Ancient and Modern of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming”). Science, says Poe, “alterest all things with . . . peering eyes,” and “peering” is not a compliment. “Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, / And driven the Hamadryad from the wood”? “Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, / . . . and from me / The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?”

Lucretius, Maxwell, Noyes, Feynman

There are plenty of pro-science poems, too, of course. Any account would have to start with Lucretius (c. 99–55 BC) and his De rerum natura. In the 1920s, the popular Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) composed a trilogy of poetry books about the history of science, declaring, “The story of scientific discovery has its own epic unity,” since pioneering scientists “have an intense human interest, and belong essentially to the creative imagination of poetry.

The American physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988) once delivered a free-verse poem as part of an address to the National Academy of Sciences, a not-great effort with a little too much didactic purpose for 1950s poetry. But the wonderful Victorian scientist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) was a reasonably good amateur poet (see our earlier discussion of amateur verse), and his poem “To F.W.F.” deserves some attention. Urging his impatient friend (the Victorian churchman Frederic William Farrar) to abandon science for poetry, Maxwell distinguishes the brick-by-brick advancement of knowledge through science with the whole-of-things-at-once grasp of the poet:

Men there are, whose patient minds,
In one object centred,
Wait, till through their darkened blinds
Truth has burst and entered.
Then, that ray so barely caught
Joyfully absorbing,
They behold the realms of Thought
Into Science orbing.

Thus they wait, and thus they toil,
Thus they end in knowing,
Like good seed in kindly soil
Taking root and growing.

But their opposites exist as well:

Men there are whose ambient souls,
In rapt Intuition,
Seize Creation as it rolls,
Whole, without partition.

In essence, Maxwell argues that science and poetry are not opposites, just varied approaches to truth appropriate for varied minds. The danger of too strong a distinction is that it may lure poets and their readers to a willful rejection of the obvious truths of science. More often, though, it tempts us to embrace the Doctrine of Double Truth. This is a medieval view, held most famously by the Latin Averroists and rejected by Thomas Aquinas and the Church in general, that Aristotelian science (the best science of the day) and religion could come to opposite conclusions without contradiction, because their truths belonged in different realms.

By extension, Double Truth imagines that science can reach conclusions and poetry can reach other conclusions, and we need not struggle to reconcile them because their varying truths simply never meet: They belong in different realms, and the mental universe lacks a unity of truth.

I think it a sad view to hold: an anti-intellectual and unserious picture of the world that eventually saps the will. One can believe, as I do, that science provides incomplete, even truncated, understandings of reality. But even if poetry is a higher wisdom, that does not mean that science is false. Where science gives us truths, poetry (like theology) must account for them.

This provides an interesting way to read Today’s Poem, “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau.” The physical atom and “Newton’s Particles of light” are not Blake’s target in his three quatrains of tetrameter verse, rhymed abcb. Science is surmounted, “sands upon the Red sea shore / Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright,” but not thereby made false. The poet’s scorn is rather for those who would take science as ultimate knowledge and use it as a handy tool with which to mock religion — and, I think, poetry. Democritus and Newton are not mockers. But Voltaire? Rousseau? These non-scientist users of science as an Enlightenment device for mocking religion — they are blinded by the sand they threw into the wind, blown back into their eyes.

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Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau

by William Blake

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, Mock on, ’tis all in vain.
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a Gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back, they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of light
Are sands upon the Red sea shore
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

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