“Scientific” Poetry

How “scientific” is “The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge,” in particular its middle section which uses the vocabularies of alchemy and astronomy? Pulter’s poem The Circle [2]21 may be the best answer to this question. In “The Circle [2]” we see a poem built around the precise use of alchemical vocabulary:

Hester Pulter, “The Circle [2]”

Those that the hidden chemic art profess
And visit Nature in her morning dress,
To mercury and sulphur philtres give
That they, consumed with love, may live
In their posterity and in them shine
Though they their being unto them resign;
Glorying to shine in silver and in gold
Which fretting vermeil poison doth enfold,
Forgetting quite that they were once refined.
By time and fate to dust are all calcined
Lying obliviated in their urn
Till they to their great ancestors return.
So man, the universe’s chiefest glory,
His primitive’s dust (alas) doth end his story.

Hester Pulter, “The Circle [2]” (Poem 21, Amplified Edition), ed. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making.

The enthusiastic embrace of, and use of, alchemical, chemical, astronomical, and other scientific vocabularies was not uncommon in this period that also saw the Scientific Revolution; we see, for instance, references to Galileo’s telescope in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Richard Leigh wrote a paean to the scientific technologies of telescope and microscope in his poem “Greatness in Little”:

Richard Leigh, “Greatness in Little"

In spotted Globes, that have resembled all
Which we, or Beasts possess, to one great Ball;
Dimme little Specks for thronging Cities stand,
Lines wind for Rivers, Blots bound Sea and Land.
Small are those Spots, which in the Moon we view
Yet Glasses these, like Shades of Mountains shew;
As what an even Brightness does retain,
A glorious Level seems, and shining Plain.
Those Crouds of Stars in the populous Sky,
Which Art beholds as twinkling Worlds on high,
Appear to naked, unassisted Sight,
No more than Sparks, or slender points of Light.
The Sun, a flaming Universe alone,
Bigger than that, about which his fires run;
Enlightening ours, his Globe but part does gild,
Part by his Lustre, or Earths Shades conceal’d;
His Glory dwindled so, as what we spy
Scarce fills the narrow Circle of the Eye.
What new America’s of Light have been
Yet undiscover’d there, or yet unseen,
Art’s near Approaches awfully forbid,
As in the Majesty of Nature hid.
Nature, who with like State, and equal Pride,
Her Great Works does in Height and Distance hide,
And shuts up her Minuter Bodies all
In curious frames, imperceptibly small.
Thus still incognito, she seeks Recess
In Greatness half-seen, or dimme Littleness.
Ah, happy Littleness! that art thus blest,
That greatest Glories aspire to seem least.
Even those install’d in a higher Sphere,
The higher they are rais’d, the less appear,
And in their Exaltation, emulate
Thy humble Grandeur, and thy modest State.
Nor is this all thy Praise, though not the least,
That Greatness, is thy Counterfeit at best.
Those swelling Honours, which in that we prize,
Thou dost contain in thy more thrifty Size;
And hast that Pomp, Magnificence does boast,
Though in thy Stature, and Dimensions lost.
Those rugged little Bodies, whose parts rise,
And fall, in various Inequalities;
Hills, in the Risings of their Surface show,
As Vallies, in their hollow Pits below.
Pompous these lesser things, but yet less rude
Then uncompact, and looser Magnitude.
What Skill is in the frame of Insects shown?
How fine the Threds, in their small Textures spun?
How close those Instruments and Engines knit,
Which Motion, and their slender Sense transmit?
Like living Watches, each of these conceals
A thousand Springs of Life, and moving Wheels.
Each Ligature a Lab’rynth seems, each part
A wonder is, all Workmanship and Art.
Rather let me this little Greatness know,
Then all the Mighty Acts of Great Ones do.
These Engines understand, rather than prove
An Archimedes, and the Earth remove.
These Atom-Worlds found out, I would despise
Columbus, and his vast Discoveries.

Richard Leigh, “Greatness in Little,” Poems upon several occasions, and, to several persons (London, 1675), pp. 35–39. EEBO. [Italics have been regularized and one emendation (“curious” for the original’s “curiour”) has been made to line 26.]

While poems like Leigh’s report on (and gush over) the newest exciting advancements of science, other poets seem to warn rather against the desire to know everything of nature, and in particular to try to know everything of the heavenly spheres. In a famous scene in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam asks about the motions of the heavens and other worlds. Raphael, to whom Adam asks these questions, quibbles slightly in his response, leading to the famous exchange given below (with highlights bolded). Like Pulter in “Perfection” line 50, Milton gestures to the possible “treble motion” of the Earth, only to refuse to decide, ultimately, on cosmological matters. Better, Raphael suggests near the end of the excerpt below, for Adam to remain “lowly wise” than to trouble himself with such matters.

John Milton, Paradise Lost

What if the Sun [Raphael says]
Be Center to the World, and other Starrs
By his attractive vertue and thir own
Incited, dance about him various rounds?
Thir wandring course now high, now low, then hid,
Progressive, retrograde, or standing still,
In six thou seest, and what if sev’nth to these
The Planet Earth, so stedfast though she seem,
Insensibly three different Motions move?
Which else to several Sphears thou must ascribe,
Mov’d contrarie with thwart obliquities,
Or save the Sun his labour, and that swift
Nocturnal and Diurnal rhomb suppos’d,
Invisible else above all Starrs, the Wheele
Of Day and Night; which needs not thy beleefe,
If Earth industrious of her self fetch Day
Travelling East, and with her part averse
From the Suns beam meet Night, her other part
Still luminous by his ray. What if that light
Sent from her through the wide transpicuous aire,
To the terrestrial Moon be as a Starr
Enlightning her by Day, as she by Night
This Earth? reciprocal, if Land be there,
Feilds and Inhabitants: Her spots thou seest
As Clouds, and Clouds may rain, and Rain produce
Fruits in her soft’nd Soile, for some to eate
Allotted there; and other Suns perhaps
With thir attendant Moons thou wilt descrie
Communicating Male and Femal Light,
Which two great Sexes animate the World,
Stor’d in each Orb perhaps with some that live.
For such vast room in Nature unpossest
By living Soule, desert and desolate,
Onely to shine, yet scarce to contribute
Each Orb a glimps of Light, conveyd so farr
Down to this habitable, which returnes
Light back to them, is obvious to dispute.
But whether thus these things, or whether not,
Whether the Sun predominant in Heav’n
Rise on the Earth, or Earth rise on the Sun,
Hee from the East his flaming rode begin,
Or Shee from West her silent course advance
With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps
On her soft Axle, while she paces Eev’n,
And bears thee soft with the smooth Air along,
Sollicit not thy thoughts with matters hid,
Leave them to God above, him serve and feare;
Of other Creatures, as him pleases best,
Wherever plac’t, let him dispose: joy thou
In what he gives to thee, this Paradise
And thy faire Eve; Heav’n is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowlie wise:
Think onely what concernes thee and thy being;
Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there
Live, in what state, condition or degree,
Contented that thus farr hath been reveal’d
Not of Earth onely but of highest Heav’n.
To whom thus Adam cleerd of doubt, repli’d.
How fully hast thou satisfi’d mee, pure
Intelligence of Heav’n, Angel serene,
And freed from intricacies, taught to live,
The easiest way, nor with perplexing thoughts
To interrupt the sweet of Life, from which
God hath bid dwell farr off all anxious cares,
And not molest us, unless we our selves
Seek them with wandring thoughts, and notions vaine.
But apt the Mind or Fancie is to roave
Uncheckt, and of her roaving is no end;
Till warn’d, or by experience taught, she learne,
That not to know at large of things remote
From use, obscure and suttle, but to know
That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the prime Wisdom, what is more, is fume,
Or emptiness, or fond impertinence,
And renders us in things that most concerne
Unpractis’d, unprepar’d, and still to seek.

John Milton, Paradise Lost (London, 1667), VIII.122–197. [Emphases added.] Project Gutenberg.

Did Milton truly believe that seeking natural knowledge was a waste compared to seeking the more perfect knowledge of God? It is perhaps tempting to read sarcasm into Adam’s response; given that Raphael gives Adam rebukes rather than answers to his questions, what does it mean for Milton to describe Adam as being “cleerd of doubt” immediately after?

To ask the question of whether “The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge” is scientific, then, may require not seeking after scientific content, but rather wondering whether something about its disjunctive form requires, or even shapes, different modes of thought. As I have suggested in a recently published chapter (Liza Blake, “Lyric and Scientific Epistemologies: Bacon and Donne,” In Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557–1623, vol. I, ed. Kristen Poole and Lauren Shohet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019], 199–214), maybe it would be more productive not to go looking for citations of scientific ideas and figures, but instead to think about how forms of poetry are shaping thoughts in new and different ways in response to the changing epistemologies of the Scientific Revolution. I end this curation, then, with Donne’s poem “The Damp,” which like Pulter’s “Perfection of Patience and Knowledge” seems to conjure scientific specifics (in Donne’s case, the scene of the anatomy theater), only to embed that scene in a poetic puzzle, “a maze” for the reader to wander through, or wonder at.

John Donne, “The Damp”

When I am dead, and doctors know not why,
And my friends’ curiosity
Will have me cut up to survey each part,
When they shall find your picture in my heart,
You think a sudden damp of love
Will thorough all their senses move,
And work on them as me, and so prefer
Your murder to the name of massacre,

Poor victories; but if you dare be brave,
And pleasure in your conquest have,
First kill th’enormous giant, your Disdain;
And let th’enchantress Honour, next be slain;
And like a Goth and Vandal rise,
Deface records and histories
Of your own arts and triumphs over men,
And without such advantage kill me then,

For I could muster up, as well as you,
My giants, and my witches too,
Which are vast Constancy and Secretness;
But these I neither look for nor profess;
Kill me as woman, let me die
As a mere man; do you but try
Your passive valour, and you shall find then,
Naked you have odds enough of any man.

John Donne, “The Damp.” Luminarium.org.