There is a famous passage in the writings of the physicist Richard Feynman in which he takes issue with poets for their perceived lack of engagement with the realities of science: ‘Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part…. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvellous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?’

This is characteristically eloquent, but also, I feel, a bit wrong-headed. I am sure that many poets are, as I am, deeply interested in the wondrous adventures of modern astronomy, but I don’t think Feynman had much understanding of the way poetic inspiration works. Real poems do not come about by poets sitting down and saying to themselves ‘Ah, time I wrote a poem about what Jupiter is really like’. It’s more a matter of having a voice in your head that suddenly says to you ‘Oi! You! Listen up…’ and what that voice says is unpredictable and depends on what, at the deepest level of your being, you are emotionally invested in. And fascinating though an immense sphere of methane and ammonia may be, it is quite hard to be emotionally invested in it. Or to put it another way, W.B.Yeats once said that out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. I think that is very true, and I find it difficult to see how Jupiter can form part of the quarrel with ourselves.

For what it’s worth, here’s one of my own poems on a cosmological theme, that nonetheless remains stubbornly rooted in the human. I don’t think Feynman would approve and yet, for better or worse, it’s what we project on to the universe that we relate to, not what the universe really is.

Cosmologies

‘If you could just keep going in a straight line’ –
Said my father, innocent of Einstein,
As we walked home one night of winter stars –
‘You’d come at last to somewhere where there was
Nothing at all. I mean, there has to be
A last star, and what then?’ This troubled me.
That night in bed I travelled in my mind
Through stars that whirled like snowflakes in the wind
Until I found, beyond one last faint glow,
A blank, like morning fog outside my window.
I woke and cried, but when my father came
To ask what ailed me, was it some old dream,
Sobbed ‘Nothing!’, so was left to sleep again
Like the blind Cyclops in his cave of pain.

Later I learned: my father had it wrong:
All lines bend back at last, however long.
There is no end to the great blizzard of light
I’d like to tell him now, and so I might
Had he not journeyed on, to somewhere far
Beyond all words of mine, and any star.

David Sutton