{"id":949,"date":"2015-04-15T17:00:39","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T17:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/?p=949"},"modified":"2015-04-15T18:48:18","modified_gmt":"2015-04-15T18:48:18","slug":"hubble-and-the-cosmic-sublime-in-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/2015\/04\/15\/hubble-and-the-cosmic-sublime-in-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Hubble and the cosmic sublime in poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The Butterfly Nebula (NGC 6302).{credit}NASA, ESA and A.Zijlstra (UMIST, Manchester, UK){\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

Twenty-five years ago, NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope began to lay bare the depths of space \u2014 from the evolution of galaxies to the age of the Universe. Beyond its contribution to science, Hubble\u2019s dazzling images of galaxies, stellar nurseries and planetary moons have mesmerised a generation.<\/p>\n

The orbiting scope has inspired in other ways. Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Tracy K. Smith<\/a> wrote her collection Life on Mars<\/i> (2011) partly in homage to a Hubble engineer \u2014 her father. (See our profile here<\/a>.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

I asked Smith for her thoughts about Hubble now, and she noted that they centre on<\/p>\n

how radically our sense of where we are and what we belong to has changed as a result of those marvellous images. They seem to straddle the real and the impossible so perfectly, hinting as they do at an order that is almost decipherable \u2014 almost visible \u2014 but that must, after a certain point, be taken for what it is: vast, mysterious, so large and ongoing as to be eternally beyond us. Perhaps that is why, at least for a writer like myself, they activate such powerful regions of the imagination.<\/p>\n

\"Poet<\/a>

Tracy K. Smith{credit}T. RUISINGER\/ROLEX\/RSA{\/credit}<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n

Observational leaps have\u00a0fired up\u00a0poets for centuries. As scientists from the seventeenth century on harnessed ever more sophisticated optics to probe the heavens (see Philip Ball\u2019s review\u00a0<\/a>of Galileo\u2019s Telescope<\/i>; 2015), transformative insights from their findings began to seep into culture, bolstered by populist works. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle\u2019s 1686 Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds<\/i>, for instance, championed the Copernican system<\/a>, framing Earth as just one world in a crowded Universe and even playing with the idea of extraterrestrial life. By the eighteenth century, Newton\u2019s revelation of a dynamic Universe had\u00a0spurred poets<\/a> such as Alexander Pope, Edward Young and James Thomson to play with the idea of the \u2018cosmic sublime\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"Anna<\/a>

Anna Barbauld, by John Chapman, 1798.{credit}National Portrait Gallery, London{\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

Anna Barbauld\u2019s 1772 nocturne A Summer Evening\u2019s Meditation<\/i><\/a> is a tour de force. Barbauld, assistant to the chemist Joseph Priestley and a champion of Enlightenment values, used science as a poetic springboard into speculation about the great beyond. \u201cThis dead of midnight is the noon of thought,\/And wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars\u201d, she writes, and imagines seeing<\/p>\n

…solitary Mars; from the vast orb
\nOf Jupiter, whose huge gigantic bulk
\nDances in ether like the lightest leaf;
\nTo the dim verge, the suburbs of the system,
\nWhere chearless Saturn ‘midst her watry moons
\nGirt with a lucid zone, majestic sits….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She ventures even into the interstellar, \u201cthe trackless deeps of space,\/Where, burning round, ten thousand suns appear\u201d \u2014 and on to regions \u201cWhere embryo systems and unkindled suns\/Sleep in the womb of chaos\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"R136<\/a>

30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud.{credit}NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI\/AURA){\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

Almost a decade later, William Herschel spotted Uranus in the \u201csuburbs\u201d, a discovery celebrated by poet and inventor Erasmus Darwin and used by the young John Keats as a symbol of Romantic wonder itself, \u00a0in his 1816 <\/i>sonnet On<\/i> First Looking Into Chapman\u2019s Homer<\/i><\/a>: \u201cThen felt I like some watcher of the skies\/When a new planet swims into his ken\u201d.<\/p>\n

Trawling the skies 200 years on, the atmospheres of exoplanets are just one of the phenomena probed by Hubble among the million images gleaned on its 4.8-billion-kilometre journey. A latterday starry messenger, it is still offering up visions that seem to \u201cstraddle the real and the impossible\u201d. As Smith recalls in \u201cMy God, It\u2019s Full of Stars\u201d from Life on Mars<\/i>, her father \u201cspent whole seasons\/Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find\u201d:<\/p>\n

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
\nFor all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
\nThe optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is \u2014<\/p>\n

\u00a0So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

See the Nature<\/em> special on Hubble’s 25th anniversary here<\/a>.\u00a0For Nature’<\/em>s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com\/news\/booksandarts<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twenty-five years ago, NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope began to lay bare the depths of space \u2014 from the evolution of galaxies to the age of the Universe. Beyond its contribution to science, Hubble\u2019s dazzling images of galaxies, stellar nurseries and planetary moons have mesmerised a generation.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3353,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,37],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","category-astronomy","tag-astronomy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3353"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}