Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the

Physical Sciences: Poetical Matter 1st

ed. Edition Gregory Tate
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/nineteenth-century-poetry-and-the-physical-sciences-
poetical-matter-1st-ed-edition-gregory-tate/
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Nineteenth-Century
Poetry and the
Physical Sciences
Poetical Matter

Gregory Tate
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK

Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

Catherine Belling
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
Chicago, IL, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new
series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in
literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine.
Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot
books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in
conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will
cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerg-
ing topics as well as established ones.

Editorial Board
Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and
Cultures, Durham University, UK
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony
Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University, USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies,
University of Oxford, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania
State University, USA
Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613
 Gregory Tate

Nineteenth-Century
Poetry and the
Physical Sciences
Poetical Matter
Gregory Tate
School of English
University of St Andrews
St Andrews, UK

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

ISBN 978-3-030-31440-8    ISBN 978-3-030-31441-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: John Tyndall, Sound: A Course of Eight Lectures Delivered at the Royal
Institution of Great Britain (Longmans, Green), Courtesy of the University of St Andrews
Library, r QC225.T9

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 For my parents,
who taught me to appreciate both poetry and science
 Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the help of a number of
people and institutions. I am grateful to the Universities of Surrey and St
Andrews for giving me the time and the means to think and to work. I am
grateful too to the British Academy for awarding me a Mid-Career
Fellowship in 2017–18, which provided me with a much-needed boost in
the closing stages of my research. I am also indebted to staff in several
libraries and archives for their generous and expert assistance: I would like
to thank the staff of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Dorset
County Museum in Dorchester, and the University of St Andrews Library’s
Special Collections; Jane Harrison, Frank James, and Charlotte New at the
Royal Institution; and Grace Timmins at the Tennyson Research Centre in
Lincoln.
The arguments that comprise the book have been informed and refined
by discussions with students, especially those on the Victorian Literature
and Science module at St Andrews, and with other scholars at conferences,
especially the annual conferences of the British Society for Literature and
Science (BSLS). I owe a particular debt to those colleagues who took
time, over the course of my research, to offer me advice, information,
conversation, and encouragement: my thanks to James Diedrick, Sam
Illingworth, Roland Jackson, Adeline Johns-Putra, Ewan Jones, Sharon
Ruston, Patrick Scott, Jane Stabler, and Martin Willis. This book would
not exist in its final form were it not for the support of the editors of the

vii
viii Acknowledgements

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine series, and the patient
guidance of Milly Davies at Palgrave Macmillan.
The book is dedicated to my parents, Andy and Esme Tate. My greatest
debt is to Rosey, William, and Felicity, who, every day, make my life better
in innumerable ways.
 Praise for Nineteenth-Century Poetry
and the Physical Sciences

“A stimulating analysis of nineteenth-century poetry and physics. In this ground-

breaking study, Tate turns to sound to tease out fascinating continuities across
scientific inquiry and verse. Reflecting that ‘the processes of the universe’ were
themselves ‘rhythmic,’ he shows that a wide range of poets and scientists were
thinking through undulatory motion as a space where the material and the imma-
terial met. ‘The motion of waves,’ Tate demonstrates, was ‘the exemplary form in
the physical sciences.’ Sound waves, light, energy, and poetic meter were each
characterized by a ‘process of undulation,’ that could be understood as both a
physical and a formal property. Drawing on work in new materialism and new
formalism, Tate illuminates a nineteenth-century preoccupation with dynamic pat-
terning that characterizes the undulatory as (in John Herschel’s words) not ‘things,
but forms.’”
—Anna Henchman, Associate Professor of English at Boston University, USA

“This impressive study consolidates and considerably advances the field of physics
and poetry studies. Moving easily and authoritatively between canonical and scien-
tist poets, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences draws scientific
thought and poetic form into telling relation, disclosing how they were under-
stood variously across the nineteenth century as both comparable and competing
ways of knowing the physical world. Clearly written and beautifully structured,
Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences is both scholarly and accessi-
ble, a fascinating and indispensable contribution to its field.”
—Daniel Brown, Professor of English at the University of Southampton, UK
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, and the Forms of Nature 23

3 Quotation and the Rhetoric of Experiment 65

4 Words and Things in the Periodical Press105

5 Tennyson’s Sounds145

6 Mathilde Blind: Rhythm, Energy, and Revolution185

7 Hardy’s Measures225

Index265

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In the early 1920s Thomas Hardy started using a notebook which he

titled “Poetical Matter I (That has not been experimented on).” The
notebook consisted of transcriptions and cuttings of various “old notes of
many years ago”: lists of possible titles for volumes of verse; discussions of
metre and rhyme; detailed drafts of some poems; and a range of fragmen-
tary observations and scenarios presumably intended to form the basis of
others.1 There were also enough references to science to suggest that the
notebook’s title, with its identification of poetry as a process of experi-
mentation on physical matter, was not a dead metaphor. One of Hardy’s
notes describes a “Poetry of the Microscope—in which minute things are
regarded as vast”; another proposes a “charming set of Poems” based on
a “microscopic view of Nature.” Hardy speculates that the microscopic
precision of scientific observation might demonstrate the materiality of
spirit (“A View. Souls, being the essence of beings, are as small as pins’
heads, & are in shoals around us”) but he also expresses “a dread—not of
the old spectres, but of those science reveals.”2 The title and contents of
the “Poetical Matter” notebook indicate that Hardy, at the end of his
career, considered the instruments and methods of science, and the

1
Thomas Hardy’s “Poetical Matter” Notebook, ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.
2
Ibid., 46, 53, 38, and 27.

© The Author(s) 2020 1

G. Tate, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences,
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_1
2 G. TATE

questions they raised about the relation between the material and the
immaterial, to be of central importance to his poetry.
This book borrows part of its title from Hardy, and it argues that his
poems represent the culmination of a nineteenth-century tradition that
identified poetry as (among other things) an experimental investigation of
the materiality of nature. It aims to show that the language and methods
of the physical sciences (primarily physics, but also the related fields of
chemistry, geology, and astronomy) made a significant contribution to
Romantic and Victorian understandings of poetry. And, as a book that
unequivocally endorses the “two-way” model of literature and science
studies first elaborated by Gillian Beer, it also argues that the influence was
reciprocal.3 Nineteenth-century science writers frequently wrote verse and
quoted the verse of others, using the cultural authority of poetry to vali-
date their observations, to summarise and communicate their theories,
and to legitimise their developing and sometimes controversial
disciplines.
As I intend to demonstrate, the reciprocal exchange of language and
ideas between poetry and the physical sciences was made possible by a
widespread belief in the similarity of their methods. Both poetry and sci-
ence were understood to be inductive: founded on the observation,
description, and interpretation of material things and empirical phenom-
ena, they also claimed the right to use their considerations of matter as the
basis of theoretical and non-empirical conclusions. Inductive poetics in
nineteenth-century Britain was based primarily on the theory and practice
of Romantic lyric; the structured eloquence of lyric verse was widely
viewed as the most culturally respectable expression of inductive thought’s
movement from the material to the theoretical. This was one of the rea-
sons why scientists persistently wrote and quoted lyric poetry. But the
inductive model also informed definitions of epic, and writers of epic
poems frequently deployed their reconstructions of the past (whether per-
sonal, political, or cosmological) as the foundations both of transhistorical
explanations of nature and of speculative predictions about the future of
the universe.
Induction was not without its detractors; doubts were voiced through-
out the century about whether the transition from the concrete to the

3
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 5.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

abstract was methodologically and epistemologically valid. The rhetoric of

experimentation, a concept that was not exclusively linked to the natural
sciences but that derived more and more of its credibility from their grow-
ing prominence in British culture, was frequently deployed by science
writers and by poets in an effort to resolve those doubts.4 The repetition
and comparison of observations, they claimed, justified the construction
of theoretical conclusions on the basis of material evidence. This book
argues that nineteenth-century poetry was experimental in the broad sense
implied by John Herschel’s definition of experiment, in his 1830
Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, as an “active
observation” of nature, in which:

we cross-examine our witness, and by comparing one part of his evidence

with the other, while he is yet before us, and reasoning upon it in his pres-
ence, are enabled to put pointed and searching questions, the answer to
which may at once enable us to make up our minds.5

Few poets seconded Herschel’s confidence in the capacity of experimenta-

tion “to make up our minds”; in fact, both poets and science writers more
often than not emphasised the baffling intractability of nature’s material-
ity. But the two sets of writers shared the conviction that their studies of
matter were of necessity active, involving to some extent the manipula-
tion—whether physical, imaginative, or linguistic—as well as the observa-
tion of material things. Nineteenth-century poetry and science were linked
by a preoccupation with the relations between matter and mind. Different
writers put forward competing and often antagonistic answers to a ques-
tion that was central to the physical sciences and to poetry: was the induc-
tive interpretation of nature a creative act of the interpreting mind or an
objective and realist reconstruction of external processes?
This question also informed debates about poetic form, specifically the
ongoing disagreements between poets, critics, and theorists about whether
poetic rhythm was a material phenomenon or an abstract pattern imposed
on language by the mind. The disputants often invoked theories and evi-
dence from the physical sciences in support of their claims, and science

4
For a discussion of literary and scientific definitions of experiment at the start of the nine-
teenth century, see Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and
Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 14–42.
5
John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1st edn.
(London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830), 77.
4 G. TATE

writers incorporated discussions of verse into their accounts of the uni-

verse. The main reason for this surprising overlap between poetry and
science was that, whichever side they took, writers on poetry rarely limited
the scope of their theories to verse itself. Instead they proposed, with vary-
ing degrees of assurance, that poetic rhythms, whether ideal or material,
were expressive and representative of the essential structure of reality. The
rhythms of verse, these writers argued, were exemplary instances either of
the activity of human and divine minds, or of the rhythmic and material
processes that constituted nature.6 This was an ambitious claim for poetic
form, and one of the aims of this book is to examine the intellectual, cul-
tural, and political contexts that helped to validate and sustain it, in various
iterations put forward by poets and by science writers, throughout the
long nineteenth century.
Scholarship on literature and science has typically identified nineteenth-­
century physics as a science of immateriality rather than of matter. Perhaps
the most influential example of this argument is Alice Jenkins’s Space and
the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain
1815–1850, which highlights “the tendency towards dematerialization,”
towards the rational study of abstract concepts rather than the sensuous
experience of material things, “in early nineteenth-century physics and
other disciplines.”7 My emphasis is different. While recognising the impor-
tance of dematerialising accounts of science (and of poetry), I argue that
matter remained the primary object of study, and a key source of conten-
tion, in poetry and in the physical sciences. Poets and science writers alike
were preoccupied with the epistemological question of whether or not it
was possible for the mind to apprehend matter through the senses, and
with the ontological question of whether or not matter was the exclusive
cause of natural processes. Their answers to these questions were influ-
enced by, and helped to fuel, some of the most prominent philosophical,
religious, and political debates in nineteenth-century Britain: theories of
materiality were closely tied, for example, to disputes about the supposed
atheism of science, and to the opposition between reformist and revolu-
tionary models of political progress.
6
For another perspective on the opposition between materialist and idealist theories of
poetic form, focusing on the contexts of technology, physiology, and experimental psychol-
ogy, see Jason David Hall, Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
7
Alice Jenkins, Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in
Britain 1815–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 208.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

The physical sciences’ sustained focus on matter, and the way in which
that focus in turn made room for abstract and dematerialising perspec-
tives, is evident in several of their most important theories. At the start of
the nineteenth century, John Dalton’s atomic weight theory, set out in the
first part of his New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), proposed that
the chemical elements of matter consisted of solid, indivisible, and inde-
structible atoms of different weights.8 This quantitative model of matter,
founded on the precise measurement of substances obtained through
experimentation, was an influential example of the epistemological and
theoretical efficacy of the experimental method. But it also raised two
issues that were to be of concern to science writers and to poets through-
out the rest of the century: it invited comparisons (damaging or not,
depending on a writer’s philosophical and political stance) between mod-
ern science and the materialist (and arguably atheist) atomism of classical
Epicurean philosophy; and it destabilised understandings of materiality by
presenting as the ultimate constituent of matter a particle which was inac-
cessible to the senses and which therefore had to be understood in statisti-
cal or hypothetical terms.
At the same time, phenomena such as light and heat, which had been
attributed to the actions of putative forms of matter, were being redefined
as kinds of motion. In 1799 Humphry Davy published the results of
experiments which indicated that heat was caused not by a distinct sub-
stance, known as “caloric,” but by the motions of the particles of matter.9
And in 1801 Thomas Young demonstrated that light was not a flow of
material corpuscles, as Isaac Newton had claimed, but a wave motion.10
Young’s observations were promptly incorporated into a comprehensive
undulatory theory that defined “imponderables,” entities such as light and
thermal radiation which were considered to be material in origin but
which themselves had no mass, as vibrations or undulations in the ether, a
material medium that permeated space. The scope of this theory was
extended further by analogy with sound. In her influential 1834 book On
the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, Mary Somerville claimed that radi-
ant heat, “like light and sound, probably consists in the undulations of an
8
John Dalton, A New System of Chemical Philosophy (London: R. Bickerstaff, 1808).
9
See Humphry Davy, “An Essay on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light,” in The
Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, 9 vols. (London: Smith, Elder,
1839–40), 2:5–86.
10
See Thomas Young, “The Bakerian Lecture: On the Theory of Light and Colours,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 92 (1802): 12–48.
6 G. TATE

elastic medium,” and that “light, heat, sound, and the waves of fluids, are
all subject to the same laws of reflection, and, indeed, their undulatory
theories are perfectly similar.”11 Sarah Alexander has argued that, at the
start of the century, “the physical sciences in Britain were increasingly
dependent upon the theoretical rather than the empirical, and the invisible
rather than the detectable, as imponderable matter theories became cen-
tral to the study of mechanics.”12 I contend, though, that the analogy
between sound and light was the exemplary argument of nineteenth-­
century physics precisely because it set up an equivalence, and not a dis-
tinction, between an empirical fact (the propagation of sound via the wave
motion of material particles) and a speculative theory (the undulations of
the ether).
The ether’s scientifically precarious position as an unverified hypothesis
was widely noted, with some writers using it to critique the sciences’ claims
to empirical objectivity and others redeploying it in support of religious or
spiritualist conjectures. But the ether was also considered to be a real form
of matter. In an 1847 essay “On the Abuse of Language, in Science and in
Common Life,” the psychologist Alexander Bain appears to propound an
unambiguous kind of linguistic positivism, advising his readers to “push
aside words and look at the actual things or substances that the world
presents to us,” and arguing that “the best methods of fixing the bounds
of the ‘material’ would be to refer it to all that immediately affects the
senses, including solid, liquid, and gaseous substances.” Yet he then adds,
seemingly without any awareness of a contradiction, “and also the fourth
element, the ether, whose activity gives us light and heat, and regulates the
forms, states, and affinities of tangible matter.”13 For Bain, the ether is as
material as the tangible forms of matter. And for the majority of nineteenth-­
century writers, its most important property was that it was simultane-
ously material and theoretical. In this sense it was a limit case of
nineteenth-century theories of materiality more generally, which typically
emphasised a duality inherent in matter: while its properties were know-
able through the senses, its ultimate structure and essence remained hidden.

11
Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 1st edn. (London: John
Murray, 1834), 250.
12
Sarah C. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 3.
13
Alexander Bain, “On the Abuse of Language, in Science and in Common Life,” Fraser’s
Magazine 35 (1847): 135.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Some researchers, however, promoted an exclusively immaterial under-

standing of the physical sciences. In his 1846 “Thoughts on Ray-­
Vibrations” Michael Faraday tries to dispense with Dalton’s concrete
atoms, positing a “view of the nature of matter which considers its ulti-
mate atoms as centres of force, and not as so many little bodies surrounded
by forces.”14 He also “endeavours to dismiss the æther, but not the vibra-
tions” of the undulatory theory, replacing the luminiferous ether with
“various kinds of lines of force” that convey light, heat, magnetism, and
gravity between the atomic centres, and that fluctuate “in a manner which
may be conceived as partaking of the nature of a shake or lateral vibration.”15
Faraday’s theorisation of “lines of force” was the basis of James Clerk
Maxwell’s work on electricity and magnetism in the second half of the
century, but Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory reversed Faraday’s position
by reinstating matter as the universal medium of natural processes. The
key difference was the replacement, both in electromagnetism and in the
laws of thermodynamics, of force (a phenomenon independent of matter)
with energy (a property inherent within matter). In his Treatise on
Electricity and Magnetism Maxwell claims that “we are unable to conceive
of propagation in time, except either as the flight of a material substance
through space, or as the propagation of a condition of motion or stress in
a medium already existing in space,” and that, therefore, “whenever
energy is transmitted from one body to another in time, there must be a
medium or substance in which the energy exists.”16 Maxwell retained both
ether and vibrations, arguing that spectroscopy, the analysis of the spectra
of light emitted from stars, indicated that the various wavelengths of elec-
tromagnetic energy were linked to undulatory motions within ponderable
matter. In an 1873 lecture on “Molecules” he comments that a molecule
of matter, “though indestructible, is not a hard rigid body, but is capable
of internal movements, and when these are excited it emits rays, the wave-­
length of which is a measure of the time of vibration of the molecule.”17
The most important developments in Victorian physics reiterated ideas
that had also been present in the theories of Dalton and Young at the start
of the century: that the processes of the universe were rhythmic (a
14
Michael Faraday, “Thoughts on Ray-Vibrations,” London, Edinburgh, and Dublin
Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 28 (1846): 345.
15
Ibid., 347–48.
16
James Clerk Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1873), 2:437–38.
17
Maxwell, “Molecules,” Nature 8 (1873): 440.
8 G. TATE

suggestion which was quickly endorsed and elaborated by poets); and that
the things involved in those processes were simultaneously material and
theoretical, beyond the range of sensuous experience.
To some extent, the cultural history of nineteenth-century physics is
comparable to that of sixteenth-century natural philosophy, as it is pre-
sented in Mary Thomas Crane’s Losing Touch with Nature. Crane argues
that natural philosophers’ discussions of minute particles and immaterial
forces, as well as the advent of heliocentric astronomy, prompted “an
unprecedented epistemological rupture” in sixteenth-century English cul-
ture, “a sundering of an embodied, intuitive grasp of the world from the
specialist’s increasingly abstract accounts of how things really worked.”
Literary writers celebrated the imaginative possibilities of these abstract
theories while also expressing a “horror at the idea that lived experience of
the world did not reliably provide access to truth about it.”18 It is possible
to formulate a similar argument about the physical sciences in the nine-
teenth century: scholars such as Jenkins and Alexander have persuasively
highlighted the theoretical tendencies of these sciences, and several
nineteenth-­century writers presented poetry, with its focus on the direct
experience of nature’s tangible materiality, as the antagonist of scientific
theory’s speculative materialism. This picture, however, is incomplete.
Rather than describing a straightforward trend towards dematerialisation
or an irrevocable sundering of scientific and literary perspectives, I want to
argue in this book that poets and science writers frequently tried to recon-
cile the two aspects of matter: the hypothetical materialism of atoms and
ether on the one hand, and the sensuous materiality accessible to the
senses and to experiment on the other.
This is a book of literary criticism rather than an intellectual history, and
its primary focus is therefore on a linguistic problem that was closely con-
nected to the shared methods and concerns of poetry and the physical
sciences. Writers in both fields worried over two related questions: to what
extent could language accurately record the experience of interacting with
matter through touch, visual observation, or experimental manipulation?
And was it possible to explain (and defend) in words the development of
theoretical arguments from material evidence? The book examines various
nineteenth-century attempts to answer these questions through a series of
(roughly chronological) case studies, which attend to the ways in which

18
Mary Thomas Crane, Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in
Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 2.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

particular words were shared, and mutually constructed, by poets and sci-
ence writers. Although the two groups’ respective definitions of these
words rarely coincided fully, they nonetheless borrowed each other’s
frames of reference to investigate, explain, and clarify them. The collective
aim of the chapters is to show that poetic and scientific accounts of the
materiality of nature were shaped by mutually informing sets of rhetorical
and stylistic techniques, and by the contested use of specific words and
phrases.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 consider terms that reflect the shared efforts of
poets and science writers to determine how the experience of materiality
might be conveyed in writing. Chapter 2 discusses the intersecting defini-
tions of material and poetic “form” set out by William Wordsworth and
Humphry Davy at the start of the century. Wordsworth and Davy agreed
that chemistry and poetry both revealed the active properties hidden
within the material “forms of nature.” And they also agreed in maintain-
ing an opposition between scientific experimentation’s focus on physical
processes and poetic form’s invocation of the metaphysical and moral
powers inherent in matter. Although this book concentrates primarily on
physics, Davy’s chemistry is central to its argument, because his experi-
mental work on the identification of new chemical elements helped to set
the agenda for nineteenth-century science’s sustained interest in the con-
stitution of matter. This, together with his prominence as a science com-
municator and his enthusiasm for poetry, makes his writing an apt point of
departure for the book’s discussion of the relations between matter and
language in nineteenth-century Britain.
Chapter 3 considers the various ways in which science writers made use
of poetic quotations: to defend the physical sciences against accusations
of reductive and mechanistic materialism; to summarise arguments about
nature in eloquent and familiar language; and to gesture towards the
metaphysical connotations of scientific theories. Quotation, for these writ-
ers, was a kind of rhetorical “experiment”; they presented poetry as a
form of words that both reiterated and supplemented the experimental
method’s observation, analysis, and theoretical interpretation of nature’s
materiality. The book’s fourth chapter traces competing definitions of the
relation between “words and things” in the periodical press. This chap-
ter argues that the press was an important site of debate about the episte-
mological shortcomings, and especially the abstract materialism, of
scientific language. Specialist terminology was satirised in poems that
10 G. TATE

simultaneously identified verse as a mode of knowledge which offered

unmediated access to the concrete materiality of nature’s things.
The final three chapters ask how particular poets understood and
deployed the forms of verse as expressions of the rhythmic vibrations of
the material universe. As Anna Henchman points out, the “undularity” of
sound, light, ether, and atoms in nineteenth-century physics “had long-
standing associations with rhythm and poetic metre, a fact noted by poets
and scientists alike.”19 Alfred Tennyson, characteristically, was both fasci-
nated and dismayed by these associations. Chapter 5 examines the ways in
which Tennyson’s poetry responds to scientific models of acoustics by try-
ing to identify “sounds” (and particularly the sound of his poetic voice) as
permanent signifiers of spiritual meaning as well as transitory vibrations of
matter. Chapter 6 attends to the connections between “rhythm” and
“energy” in electromagnetic and thermodynamic theory in the late nine-
teenth century. It focuses on the politically radical verse of Mathilde Blind,
which presents metre as an expression of a universal rhythm that structures
the motions of matter and energy, and that underwrites the ontological
equality of living and inorganic things. The closing chapter argues that
Thomas Hardy’s poetry reflects on nineteenth-century debates about
matter through its interrogation of poetic and scientific understandings of
“measure.” Like Tennyson and Blind, Hardy uses the “measures” of
accentual-syllabic verse to present a view of the material universe, informed
by physical science, as rhythmic and measurable. But the idiosyncratic
stanza forms of his poetry also suggest that scientific measurements are
inescapably subjective, and that the metrical motions of matter are sub-
tended by a fundamental indeterminacy.
The book’s consideration of the whole of the long nineteenth century
(from Wordsworth’s writings of the 1790s to Hardy’s poetry of the
1920s), and its focus on specific case studies, means that there are gaps in
its coverage. For instance, it does not discuss Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sus-
tained interest in the physical sciences. And, at the other end of the cen-
tury, several late-Victorian poets (such as Alice Meynell, May Kendall, and
Gerard Manley Hopkins) wrote about physics and its relation to verse.20 A
19
Anna Henchman, “Outer Space: Physical Science,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian
Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 695.
20
On Shelley and chemistry, see Barbara Estermann, “Attraction and Combination: The
Science of Metamorphosis in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam,” Studies in Romanticism 50
(2011): 413–36. On Hopkins and physics, see Gillian Beer, “Helmholtz, Tyndall, Gerard
Manley Hopkins: Leaps of the Prepared Imagination,” in Open Fields: Science in Cultural
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

number of important researchers in the physical sciences—namely Dalton,

Faraday, and Young—are also absent throughout much of the book. My
pragmatic (or self-justifying) reason for their omission is that they did not
consistently write poetry, write about poetry, or use poetic quotations.21
Conversely, some writers—Herschel, Maxwell, Somerville, the historian
and philosopher of science William Whewell, the physicist and science
communicator John Tyndall, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—are discussed
in several chapters, because their examinations of the links between poetry
and the physical sciences were especially detailed and influential.
Wordsworth and Tennyson, too, are important figures, because of the
frequency with which they were alluded to by other poets and quoted by
science writers.
The recurring presence of these figures illustrates the main reason for
the wide historical scope of this book: I want to emphasise the significant
continuities between Romantic, Victorian, and early twentieth-century
poetry and physics, which can be obscured by the widespread tendency to
divide the long nineteenth century into discrete periods. My hope is that
a historical purview of the century as a whole, structured and punctuated
by detailed case studies, will enable a discriminating assessment both of
what changes and of what stays the same in understandings of the relations
between poetry and science. It will also counter the temptation to make
one-sided statements about how Romantic and Victorian poetry, or
Romantic science and Victorian scientific naturalism, differ fundamentally
from one another.
There are three broad continuities that underpin the book’s argument.
The first is its poets’ adherence to the metres and forms of English
accentual-­syllabic verse, and the belief, shared to some extent by most
nineteenth-century poets and science writers, that those forms were a frac-
tal manifestation of the rhythms that structured the interactions between
mind and matter (this formal criterion explains why the final chapter dis-
cusses Hardy but not Modernist poets). Second, the majority of Romantic
and Victorian poets and science writers used their investigations of matter
as the basis of ontological claims about the essence of reality. Such claims

Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 242–72; and Daniel Brown, Hopkins’ Idealism:
Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
21
However, in his youth, Faraday wrote poems, and essays that quoted poetry, as part of a
programme of self-education. See Michael Faraday’s Mental Exercises: An Artisan Essay
Circle in Regency London, ed. Alice Jenkins (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008).
12 G. TATE

frequently revealed a shared debt to monist theories, particularly those of

the Epicurean poet Lucretius and the seventeenth-century philosopher
Baruch Spinoza, which argued that the universe was composed of a single
substance (whether defined as matter, or God, or both simultaneously).22
Marjorie Levinson has suggested that Spinoza’s thinking is “a submerged
philosophical context in a number of nineteenth-century poetries”; the
same is true of the physical sciences.23 Third, these ontological arguments
were also political. Exchanges between poetry and the physical sciences in
nineteenth-century Britain supported the dissemination both of secular
worldviews and of metaphysical (either Christian or idealist) interpreta-
tions of matter. In most cases, although not without exception, materialist
theories of nature were associated with religious scepticism and political
radicalism, while criticisms of materialism were deployed in aid of conser-
vative positions.
These debates about poetry, philosophy, and politics were linked by a
shared problem of representation: to what extent was it possible to under-
stand and theorise matter using language? By examining the history of this
question across the nineteenth century, I aim to show that a comparative
analysis of poetry and science writing can contribute to, and negotiate
between, two of the most important recent trends in literary studies,
which can be summarily identified as a “new materialism” and a “new
formalism.” The study of literature and science, I think, offers a means of
integrating the examination of material things with the interpretation of
the linguistic and formal elements of written texts.
My approach to realising this integration is based in part on Bruno
Latour’s “actor-network theory,” which argues that any phenomenon is
constituted by a network of connections between a range of “actants,” a
term that encompasses everything from “intentional humans” to animals,
institutions to texts, human-made artefacts to “natural objects.”24 Latour’s
flat ontology rejects distinctions between subject and object and between
value and fact, replacing these binaries with what he terms, following

22
On Lucretius, see Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the
New Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); and John Holmes,
“Lucretius at the Fin de Siècle: Science, Religion and Poetry,” English Literature in Transition
1880–1920 51 (2008): 266–80.
23
Marjorie Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” Studies in Romanticism
46 (2007): 367.
24
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

Michel Serres, “quasi-objects, quasi-subjects.” These exist not as “simple,

more or less faithful intermediaries” in social and natural processes but as
“mediators—that is, actors endowed with the capacity to translate what
they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also to betray it.”25 Although
Latour is chary of the word “matter” and its connotations of passivity—
“the ‘matter’ of most self-proclaimed materialists does not have a great
deal to do with the type of force, causality, efficacy, and obstinacy non-­
human actants possess in the world”—his theory is particularly useful in
the study of literary and scientific writing about materiality.26 It offers a
model in which different kinds of text (poems or lectures), person (poets,
experimental researchers, or science communicators), and thing (the tan-
gible matter of a rock or the hypothetical medium of the ether) can be
viewed as equivalent actors in the historical development of arguments
about matter.
The “vital materiality” theorised by Jane Bennett is also important to
this book, because it is based on a definition of matter strikingly similar to
that which underpinned nineteenth-century debates. Like several
Romantic and Victorian poets and science writers, Bennett locates her
theory of matter within a historical tradition founded on the monisms of
Lucretius and Spinoza. She shares with those philosophers an understand-
ing of matter that emphasises its activity and motion rather than its inert
rigidity: “my goal is to theorize a materiality that is as much force as entity,
as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension.”27 And, using
Latour’s term “actants,” she puts forward a levelling interpretation of the
human and the non-human as ontologically equivalent: “the case for mat-
ter as active needs also to readjust the status of human actants: not by
denying humanity’s awesome, awful powers, but by presenting these pow-
ers as evidence of our own constitution as vital materiality.” “Human
power,” she concludes, “is itself a kind of thing-power.”28 Bennett’s argu-
ments, and the sublimity with which her adjectives (“vibrant,” “vital,”
“awesome,” “awful”) imbue matter, aligns her work with the “dynamic
materialism” that Levinson identifies as characteristic of Romantic

25
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1993), 51 and 81.
26
Latour, Reassembling, 76.
27
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 20.
28
Ibid., 10.
14 G. TATE

poetry.29 This reading of matter, I argue, is central not just to Romantic

verse but to poetry and science writing throughout the long nineteenth
century. Disputes about materiality often hinged on the question of
whether or not particular poets and science writers, or poetry and the
physical sciences in general, endorsed this view of matter as the vital stimu-
lus of natural processes and human actions.
At the same time as they embraced or deplored humans’ proximity to
matter, nineteenth-century writers also frequently emphasised the other-
ness and epistemological intractability of material things. A comparable
position is advocated in Graham Harman’s account of “object-oriented
literary criticism.” Harman’s argument is based on speculative realism, a
philosophy which insists on the legitimacy of theorising “a mind-­
independent reality” of external objects.30 Literary criticism, Harman con-
tends, has to acknowledge that this reality cannot be straightforwardly
explained in the terms of human experience, and that not just literary texts
but “all human dealings with the world” automatically fail to grasp the
essence of objects: “the irreducibility of reality to literal presence applies as
much to the sciences as it does to poetry.”31 Harman is concerned with the
problems involved in representing objects, but, surprisingly, his essay says
nothing about the particular ways in which writers’ language might
acknowledge, exacerbate, elide, or circumvent those problems. Nineteenth-­
Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences, conversely, aims to study the lin-
guistic difficulties and possibilities involved in writing about natural
objects, of which poets and science writers were acutely aware.
In 2015 Richard Grusin presented speculative realism, actor-network
theory, and Bennett’s “thing-power” as examples of a “nonhuman turn”
in literary studies. “Among the features that loosely link” them, according
to Grusin, “is that they were all opposed, in one way or another, to the
more linguistic or representational turns of the 1970s through 1990s—
such as the textual, cultural, ideological, or aesthetic turns.”32 In my view,
though, this account of an opposition between matter and representation
as objects of study is too straightforward; even if theorists present their
work as unambiguously objective or realist in orientation, it is difficult to
29
Levinson, “Motion,” 374.
30
Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary
Criticism,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 184.
31
Ibid., 190.
32
Richard Grusin, Introduction, in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Grusin (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2015), x.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

see how literary critics and historians can avoid addressing linguistic, tex-
tual, and aesthetic questions. My approach, examining representations of
the relation between matter and language as they developed over the
course of the nineteenth century, builds on the work of scholars such as
Noah Heringman, who in Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology practises
what he terms “aesthetic materialism,” “a critical method responding to
historical and cultural materialism by articulating a historically specific
conception of materiality.” Although “oriented toward the social context
of literature,” Heringman writes, “my method differs from other histori-
cist approaches by attempting to locate the sphere identified as material in
the period under analysis itself.”33 Along with Paul Gilmore’s work on
nineteenth-century American literature and electricity, Heringman’s elab-
oration of the links between Romantic poetry and geology demonstrates
that scientific theories, social contexts, and the linguistic details of literary
texts are interconnected elements of any “historically specific conception
of materiality.”34
Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences uses Heringman’s
critical method of aesthetic materialism to trace the history of Romantic
and Victorian debates about philosophical materialism, the belief that
everything in the universe is explicable on the basis of matter and its
properties. While I argue that philosophical materialism exerted a signifi-
cant, and to a large extent unrecognised, influence on nineteenth-cen-
tury British culture, I also want to emphasise the ambiguity with which
“materialism” and related words were deployed, and the difficulty
involved in trying to assign them fixed meanings. Numerous writers
throughout the century accused other people of materialism, but few
were prepared to identify themselves as materialists. In studying the pro-
tean and contested meanings of “materialism” and of other key terms
such as “nature,” my goal is to reconstruct, as carefully as possible, what
writers thought about matter by examining the best available evidence:
the language they used to write about it. This version of historicism has
been identified by Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, following
Thomas Dixon, as “word history” or “historical semantics,” an approach
which recognises that “the changing fortunes of a term have significant

33
Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2004), 21.
34
Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009).
16 G. TATE

implications for the construction and communication of the various ideas

it might entail,” and that language “is not passively reflective, but is itself
an agent of intellectual change.”35 This method underpins the book as a
whole and each of its separate case studies, which examine the competing
and overlapping uses, in poetry and in science, of particular terms: form,
experiment, words, things, sound, energy, rhythm, and measure.
The case studies also attend to the social contexts that helped to shape
the nineteenth century’s languages of materiality. Chapters 2, 3, and 4, for
example, consider how the political tenor of debates about matter and
language was determined in part by the institutions within which words
were spoken or written. These chapters examine several different institu-
tional contexts: the metropolitan Royal Institution; the more socially and
geographically inclusive, but also professionalising (and therefore exclu-
sive in another way), meetings of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science; and, within the periodical press, the Tory
Quarterly Review, the satirically conservative Punch, and the liberal
Fortnightly Review. As the example of the press illustrates, institutional
contexts were often inseparable from textual contexts, and Nineteenth-­
Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences also considers the different ways in
which a poem (or an excerpted line or stanza) might be interpreted when
it was published in a volume of verse, in a periodical, or as the epigraph to
a scientific treatise. The book analyses science writing in the same way,
asking how different institutional environments or textual media (note-
books, lectures, textbooks) modified the meanings of new or contentious
words such as “energy” or “materialism.”
The book’s method, then, is first and foremost historicist, and therefore
typical of perhaps the majority of scholarship on literature and science. But
it is also influenced by recent calls for a renewed attention to the formal
structures of literary texts, and I think that the study of literature and sci-
ence is particularly well-positioned to mediate between the concerns of
historicism and those of the new formalism. Some critics, conversely, place
the two in opposition to each other. In The Limits of Critique Rita Felski
argues that the revival of interest in form has highlighted the way in which
historicism’s focus on context petrifies “works of art as nothing more than
cultural symptoms of a historical moment, as moribund matter immured

35
Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, Introduction, in Victorian Scientific Naturalism:
Community, Identity, Continuity, ed. Dawson and Lightman (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2014), 2.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

in the past.” “We cannot close our eyes to the historicity of art works,”
Felski concedes, but “we sorely need alternatives to seeing them as tran-
scendentally timeless on the one hand and imprisoned in their moment of
origin on the other.”36 She advocates Latour’s actor-network theory as the
way out of the contextual prison, because it enables a redefinition of works
of art as actants with a degree of agency rather than as inert epiphenomena
of historical contexts. But she also warns of the limitations of “lopsided”
modes of Latourian literary criticism, in which “themes from actor-­
network theory are incorporated into existing practices of close reading,”
as “the critic traces out the movement and interconnection of actants
within the confines of a literary work.”37 Felski is sceptical of this approach,
it seems, because she views it as a kind of repackaged new criticism. If I am
honest, though, much of Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical
Sciences is devoted to precisely this sort of reading, analysing the intercon-
nections between human and non-human actants within poetry and sci-
ence writing.
This method of historically informed close reading is not especially
original, but its integration of historical and linguistic concerns is precisely
the means through which scholarship on literature and science can negoti-
ate between materialist and formalist approaches to literary studies. It is,
in effect, already the type of literary criticism that Felski advocates: not
really close reading, but “mid-level reading,” involving the interpretation
of “objects and mediations as well as literary works, a practice of lateral
reading across multiple texts rather than deep and intensive reading of a
single text.”38 By examining two radically distinct kinds of writing, by
analysing the similarities and differences in their diction and style, and by
mapping the intellectual and institutional networks that link them together
and that help to explain those similarities and differences—to use Latour’s
terms, by attending to linguistic and formal as well as material and social
actants—literature and science studies can illuminate the historically con-
tingent ways in which the relations between the human and the non-­
human have been understood.
My dual emphasis on linguistic and historical specificity diverges in
some respects from the new formalism, particularly as it has been theorised
by Caroline Levine. In a 2006 essay outlining her method of “strategic

36
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 154.
37
Felski, “Latour and Literary Studies,” PMLA 130 (2015): 738.
38
Ibid., 741.
18 G. TATE

formalism,” Levine promotes an understanding of form that refuses tex-

tual or historical limitations:

Form, in my definition, refers to shaping patterns, to identifiable interlacings

of repetitions and differences, to dense networks of structuring principles
and categories. It is conceptual and abstract, generalizing and transhistori-
cal. But it is neither apolitical nor ahistorical. It does not fix or reduce every
pattern to the same. Nor is it confined to the literary text, to the canon, or
to the aesthetic.39

My approach is transhistorical to the extent that it maps the persistence of

forms (for example, accentual-syllabic verse and poetic quotations in sci-
ence writing) across the long nineteenth century. But I worry, despite
Levine’s assurances, that her definition of form is too generalising, both
because it risks ignoring the particular historical conditions that help to
shape each iteration of a form (a risk which I hope is countered in this
book by the specific focus of each of the case studies) and because it col-
lapses the distinctions between textual and non-textual forms. Any net-
work or structure may be identifiable as a form in the sense that it depends
on spatial and temporal patterns, but it does not follow that these different
forms can be studied and interpreted using the same critical methods.
Levine refined her definition of form in 2015, acknowledging that forms
are determined to some extent by their material conditions, and that lan-
guage “lays claim to its own forms—syntactical, narrative, rhythmic, rhe-
torical—and its own materiality—the spoken word, the printed page.”40
And in a contrasting take on formalism, of direct relevance to the study of
literature and science, Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian argue
that “a truly interdisciplinary practice will accept that notions of form vary
meaningfully across disciplines” and “that the differences among them are
sometimes irreducible.” “To use form to explain something” in literary
criticism, therefore, “requires a working vocabulary proper to the literary
before form can be welcomed into analogy with other things.”41 This
book discusses institutional networks and the objects and phenomena

39
Caroline Levine, “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies,”
Victorian Studies 48 (2006): 632.
40
Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2015), 10.
41
Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry
43 (2017): 652.
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

studied by the physical sciences, but its method is founded on interpreta-

tions of the textual and rhetorical forms of language, and of the different
ways in which those forms are deployed in poetry and in science writing.
These comparative readings are guided by another aspect of Levine’s
strategic formalism: its emphasis on the relations between forms. Levine
writes that forms “have no intrinsic political efficacy” in themselves; “they
take on their political force only in encounters with other forms.” The aim
of her method is therefore “not to isolate forms” or “to choose between
them, but to recognize their challenges to each other.”42 If the scope of
these formal encounters and challenges is widened to take in their episte-
mological and emotional as well as their political force, then they become
valuable tools for a historicist literary criticism that reads across multiple
kinds of text. And Henry Turner has suggested that the tendency of forms
to overlap, collide, and redefine one another is similarly important to the
history of science. Citing the range of concepts, metaphors, and represen-
tations that have accrued around the gene, a seemingly discrete material
thing, he notes that “the very term ‘form’ in the singular tends to reify and
render static something that is better regarded both as a plurality—as a
collection of forms, across many different scales—and as an ongoing
process.”43
Form, in just this sense of an active process or patterning, was a key-
word in nineteenth-century theories that defined nature as the sum of
matter’s motions. The exemplary form in the physical sciences was wave
motion: in an 1830 essay on sound, John Herschel summarily classified
sound waves and other undulations as not “things, but forms.”44 For a
number of nineteenth-century science writers, and for poets too, the plu-
ral process of undulation connected the movement of the seas, the propa-
gation of sound in the air, the transmission of light and energy through
the ether, and, by extension, the oscillating metres of accentual-syllabic
verse; each, they suggested, was a different manifestation of a universal
pattern. And both groups of writers worried about, and discussed in their
work, the question of whether or not it was possible to represent natural
forms using the stylistic and rhetorical forms of written and spoken

42
Levine, “Strategic Formalism,” 647.
43
Henry S. Turner, “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa):
Reflections on ‘Form’,” Isis 101 (2010): 584.
44
Herschel, “Sound” (1830), in Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, vol. 4 (London: B. Fellowes,
1845), 755.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
ONNI.

Maa liian kaunis, taivas liian kirkas on, sen sini liian väkevä ja
polttavainen. Maan lapselle on armo ansaitsematon, jo täällä
saada onni, autuus taivahainen.

Kuin jäinen puu, mi alastonna raukenee

tuoll' alttihiksi kevätpäivän syleilylle,
niin sieluni mun asunnoksi aukenee
nyt ilolle, ah, ikävöiden itketylle.

Kuink' onkaan suurin ihme yksinkertainen!

Vain haaveksia, rukoella hartahasti,
niin saapuu kaikki myötä hetken ainoisen,
ja malja kallis täyttyy kukkuroilleen asti.

Elämän riemu katsoo silmin palavin,

ne polttavat niin syvän, taivaan siintävinä.
Mit' ikävöisin enää, mitä kaipaisin?
Jo tulin liian, liian rikkahaksi minä.
ME KAKSI VALKOISTA LINTUA —

Me kaksi valkoista lintua nyt lennämme pilvien taa. Niin

kauas, niin kauas jää allemme pieni maa. Me raikkaita tuulia
halkoen nyt uimme avaruutehen, ja huikaisun meri soi ympäri,
suonissa humisee veri. Me sineä juomme riemusta
humaltuen.

Me kaksi valkoista lintua nyt lennosta väsähtäin alas

syöksymme pyörtyin kautt' ilmojen häikäiseväin. Kaks
ruumista maassa värisee, sydän sydäntä vasten kylmenee.
Kylän pienokaiset ne laulaen pitävät hautajaiset, laps'äänet
heleät yllämme helkkyilee.

Me kaksi valkoista lintua nyt varjossa pähkinäpuun unt'

onnesta näämme ja tuoksuista toukokuun. Sinivuokot
kummulla kukkivat, ja ylhäältä pilvenhattarat niin hauraina
hymyy … Ah, sinne sinisyyksihin lymyy ilon ihanin hurma ja
haaveet puhtaimmat.
HELLUNTAIKELLOT.

Halki aamun terhenen soi ääni armahani. Herään — soivat

huomenkellot kautta ikkunani.

Nousen nuorna, hymyhuulin — huomenkellot soivat.

Heleätä helluntaita huomenkellot soivat — aavistuksia
autuaita sieluni kellot soivat!

Kuinka sentään ihanaa on ihmislapsen elää! Sävel elon

suuren laulun suonissani helää — suonissani soiden helää
ilo, kaiho verten nuorten. Oi, jos kelloin kaiku kantais minut
kauas yli laaksoin, vuorten —!
VALKEA PÄIVÄ.

Ajatukseni lailla auringon säteen säihkyy, karkeloi. Sinä, ken

ani armaasti tartuit käteen, kuuntele, kuuntele, kuinka mun
syömeni soi!

On kuin joku jouhisoittimehen siellä kajoais, kiviraunion

karuun tummuutehen valkea pensas luntansa varistais.

Suvilämminnä siintää taivaan kaari yllä kaupungin. Tule,

jossain on tuoksuva jasmiinisaari, linna ja portaat, johtavat
pilvihin!
VIHREÄ HUMALA KUKKII…

Vihreä humala kukkii, lehtii tuuhea niini. Onnen pikarista

vuotaa loppumaton viini.

Taivas, pilvien anna ratketa itkemähän! Pieni sydän

pakahtuupi autuuteensa tähän.
PILVINEN PÄIVÄ.

Rannalta kurjenmiekkoja poimin

ja kuuntelen kuikan ääntä.

Miksi nyt niin tuulessa valittavat kaislat

ja pilveen on peittynyt taivas?

Eikö eilen kurjenmiekat aurinkoa juoneet

ja nurmi ollut houkuttavan lämmin?

Eikö mua kutsunut hän nurmilinnuksensa,

kun poveansa vasten minut painoi?

Pilvipäivät saavat, ah, aurinkoisten jälkeen,

kun huikaisevan kirkasta on ollut! —

Pääskyset jo liitelevät alahalla aivan,

ja apea on kuikan ääni.
ORJANRUUSU.

Mua kutsuu metsäsaari pois vainioiden taa.

Käyn sinne kesäyönä, kun kaste kimaltaa.
Ma karhunsammalmättäälle vaivun itkemään,
ja kyyneleeni virtaa maan multaan viileään.

Ah, orjanruusupensas mun oli rakkautein!

Sen oksat sormin vertyvin seppeleeksi tein.
Ja kukkaterät puunsi kuin sisus kirsikan,
mut joka piikki myötään toi kivun katkeran.

Nyt polkeako täytyy mun ruusut rakkautein,

suur ikävä ja riemu ja tuska sydämein?
Oi lausu itse, armas, sun kuinka kieltää voin,
kun silmiesi loisteen ma sieluhuni join!

Oi lausu itse, kuinka sun poistan muistostain,

kun läsnäolos autuuden tuntea ma sain,
kun öin ja päivin äänes mun korvissani soi…
Ah, liian paljon lemmin, sua unhottaa en voi!
SCHUMANNIN »TRÄUMEREI».

On ilma kellanhimmeä — se tuoksuu jasmiinilta, ja lyhdyt

tanssipaviljonkiin heittää säihkettään. Mut huvilasta, korkealta
köynnösterassilta soi sellon tumma ääni yksinään. On ilma
kellanhimmeä — se tuoksuu jasmiinilta… — Mun joku pyytää
soutelemaan venheellään.

Yö samettinen, lämmin, vedenpinta peilityyni, kuin sulaa

kristallia venhe hiljaa halkoilee. Oon soutajasta haaveksinut
salaa — tunnen syyni: kuin pieni lintu sydän vapisee. Yö
samettinen, lämmin, vedenpinta peilityyni… — Jo sellon syvä,
tumma ääni vaikenee.
DOLCE FAR NIENTE.

On alla auringon
heleän
niin lämmin rinteellä maata mäen.
Ma kuulen hyttysten
hyrinän
ja muurahaisten ma saatot näen.

On olo rauhaa
ja unelmaa.
Näin oman sykkeensä sydän kuulee.
Nyt toistaan lempivät
taivas, maa.
Vain metsäsaarelta salaa tuulee.

Kuin kimalainen,
mi laskeuu
tuon kelta-angervon kukinnolle,
niin olen ahnas
ja herkkusuu
ma kesän tuoksulle, auringolle.
 Jo täynnä kennot on hunajaa, ja uutta tuo joka uusi
huomen. Ah, autuaasti mua unettaa. Se painaa umpehen
silmäluomen.

V.
OCEANIA.

(à la Pierre Loti).

Maa merellinen kookospalmuines,

yöperhoines —
ma poimimaan käyn koralleja rannoilles.

Sa mitään muista, mitään toivo et.

Sa mieti et.
Vain valtameren hengitystä kuuntelet.

Ja Tyynimeri suolavuoteellaan
sun autuaan,
sun onnellisen suutelee yön unholaan,

kun yli basalttisen louhikon

lyö vallaton
veen hyöky. Valkojasmiinis kuin vaahto on.

Ei laula ykskään pieni siivekäs

sun metsissäs,
vain kaiku vastaa varjoisista siimeistäs,
 laps aaltojen ja aavistusten maan
kun kaipuutaan
yön hiljaisuuteen huhuu ruokohuilullaan.
FANTASIA.

Jossain pyörryttävän
kaukana —
öljytyynen, kavalan valtameren
villin rehevässä saaressa
kelluu hunajankeltainen jättiläiskukka
höyryävän lammen pinnalla
niinkuin oudon suuri, samettinen
dahlia —

Loistavat, myrkylliset hyönteiset laskevat miljoonia muniaan

limantahmeiden terälehtien lomiin. Metsän kuumehorteisista
puista tippuu helmeilevä tuskanhiki jossain pyörryttävän
kaukana —
MYRKKYLILJAT.

Voi häntä, jolle nykyisyys ei riitä! Hän vaatii myöskin ajan

mennehen ja poimii niinkuin polttoyrtit siitä jok' ainoon
lemmittynsä askelen.

Hän suven hyvää hedelmää ei niitä, hän myrkyttämä

mustain liljojen. Hän saamastaan ei sallimusta kiitä, vaan
itkee maata, joka vajos merehen!

Ah, kesken suudelmia suruun vaipuin voi värähdellä

mimosan hän lailla ja vaiti on, ei nosta katsettaan.

Kuut kauniit katoo kyynelusviin haipuin, ja unen lempeätä

lahjaa vailla hän öisin vääntelehtii vuoteellaan.
MUSTANPUNAINEN MELANKOLIA.

Kookospalmujen siimestämä tie, jota käyden askeleeni

kantaa pitkin ahnaan, huohottavan meren liejuista rantaa.
Luode kaikki rakkaimpani vie, muodottomia ruumiita
mukanaan vuoksi kantaa.

Kookospalmujen siimestämä tie, tumma loimu

aarniometsäin yllä — raskas murhe sydämessä hyljätyllä.
Mikä tähti palanutkaan lie kerran unikoilla peitetyn kehtoni
yllä?

Kuuma, vereen kastettu tähti paloi!

ODALISKI.

Hän lojuu pieluksilla divaanin, ja olkapäältä liukuu silkkihiha.

On huulet punaiset kuin luumun liha, mut kasvot kuultaa lailla
balsamin.

Ja ikkunansa peittyin ruusuihin kuin hiillos hehkuu —

silmissään on viha: ei riitä niille puisto, pylväspiha, ne
köynnösverkoin kietoo seraljin.

Niin tukehduttaa lemu myrhan, myskin, ja unhottunut ilmain

heleyskin on tällä puolen tumman ristikon.

Ah, siellä virta välkkyy auringossa, ja täysin purjein keinuu

aallokossa nyt laiva lähtövalmis, levoton —!
LOTI AZIYADÉLLE.

Oi Sirkassian metsien myrttikukka,

joka suot minun juoda huultesi hunajaa!
Sinä suloinen! Syvin lainein aaltoaa
alas olkapäillesi ambrantuoksuinen, tumma tukka.
Aziyadé!

Valot kirkkaat illoin syttyvät Stambulissa,

väri silmäisi fosforiloistein kimmeltää.
Sisin sielus arvoitukseksi aina jää,
sinä Aasian poloinen, silkinpehmeä pieni kissa.
Aziyadé!
KEVÄISET AROT.

Tuulen siivin lempi toi mun halki aromaan.

Kukkaverho kirjava sen peitti kokonaan. —
Nauratko, kaunis Katinka?

Kukkasiksi muuttua jos onnemme nyt vois,

tuoksuavan tulvan alla laajat arot ois! —
Uskotko, armas Katinka?

Mutta niinkuin hyasintit, liljat, tulppaanit,

helle polttaa nuoruutemme riemut kaunihit. —
Itketkö, pieni Katinka?
LAULU KITARAN SÄESTYKSELLÄ.

Lauloi nuori gondolieri hämyssä Venetsian yön: itkettävää niin

ei ole mitään kuin on kylmä, lemmetön syön!

Sulaa vuorten sininen jääkin,

ei sula sydämesi sun,
säihkyvän ihana, julma Judith,
riistäjä rauhani, toivoni mun!

Kukkivat visaiset viikunapuutkin, lempeen ei puhkea

lemmetön syön! — Hiljaa kapea gondooli liukui hämyssä
Venetsian yön.
RAKKAUS.

Ruusu puhkesi punainen keskellä keltaista poutaa. Tumma,

polttava viini sen suonissa soi ja soutaa. Pisaran yhden jos
viiniä juo ikuinen onni vuottaa, kaksi pisarta tuskan tuo, kolme
kuoleman tuottaa.