Today’s Poem: To Science

The cost of the modern

Joseph Wright,  The Orrery (1766) (Wikimedia Commons)

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Sonnet—To Science

by Edgar Allan Poe

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! 
   Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. 
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, 
   Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? 
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, 
   Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering 
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, 
   Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? 
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, 
   And driven the Hamadryad from the wood 
To seek a shelter in some happier star? 
   Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, 
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me 
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

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It’s hard to say when there first emerged the sense that modernity came with costs — the notion that the Enlightenment erased something vital in human experience. Certainly by the time Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was writing, the idea was well worn.

But not, for all that, a dominant idea. The 19th century had plenty of defenders of the intellectual and social movements that gave birth to the modern age’s sense of progress — science, liberal democracy, Protestant religion, capitalism, exploration, Enlightenment philosophy: all that we might dub the “elective affinities” (borrowing from Max Weber) of modern times.

Still, a counter-current had been set loose, a mistrust of progress, that would expand in later years. Here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we’ve mentioned this sense of a cost for modernity when we looked at Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem, “Dover Beach,” and again when we looked at William Butler Yeats’s 1919 “The Second Coming.”

And here it is even earlier in Poe’s 1829 “Sonnet—To Science,” directed specifically at the costs that the gains of science had brought. This spring we noodled a little about the relation of poetry and science, but here I want to think about general unease about modernity. We could speak of various 18th-century counter-enlightenment figures — de Maistre, Burke, Hamann — but for the likes of Poe, the origin is probably Rousseau’s romanticism, given a specific shape as the injury suffered by poets from the explanatory tyranny of science.

Poe’s “Sonnet—To Science” is an early poem, written when he was twenty, and matches poorly with the superior and scientific tone of his later prose attacks on such pseudosciences as astrology and phrenology. For that matter, his 1848 Eureka was in several ways an attempt to solve scientific puzzles.

Poe c. 1849 (Wikimedia Commons)

Still, “Sonnet—To Science” is worth thinking about in itself. A Shakespearian sonnet —pentameter, rhymed abab-acac-dede-ff, iambic but with several substitutions — the poem rushes through a jeremiad against science in the first eight lines. Just as time alters things, wearing them away, so science alters everything it looks at through its “peering eyes.” It’s a dull-winged vulture, who will not leave a poet alone to seek the wonder of the skies.

In the final six lines, Poe gives examples of a world stripped of meaning: a world taken over by what Terry Pratchett’s discworld comedies would call the Auditors. In a world of pure science, the light of the sun would still reach earth as the planet rotates. There just wouldn’t be dawn anymore, but because that requires human experience — and poets.

And science has already done so much damage to the old world of mythological thickness. The goddess of the hunt has been dragged from her chariot, the naiads from the rivers, and the hamadryads from the woods (to go to some other planet, some “happier star,” which is the theme of innumerable fantasy novels about the old gods fleeing earth).

The final damage, however, is to the poet, who has been forced out of his “summer dream beneath the tamarind tree.” The sense is that the world has grown thin under the brutal reign of science. It has been disenchanted (to borrow again from Max Weber).

No sane person can doubt that the medical and ethical gains of the modern age were worth many of their costs. But those costs were real, and, equally, no sane person can deny their existence.

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