Darwin sonnets
Darwin sonnets
Darwin's Loft
Extract from the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
Chapter one. On the breeds of domestic pigeonsBelieving that it is always best to study some special group, I have, after deliberation, taken up domestic pigeons. I have kept every breed that I could purchase or obtain, and have been most kindly favoured with skins from several quarters of the world ... Many treatises in different languages have been published on pigeons, and some of them are very important, as being of considerable antiquity. I have associated with several eminent fanciers, and have been permitted to join two of the London pigeon clubs. The diversity of breeds is astonishing.
He watched men take a pigeon in the hand
examine feathers, beak, each feature traced
in their mind's eye, each new potential scanned,
the offspring judged, selected, each one placed
appropriately in pies or breeding schemes.
Men homing in to make their dreams come true
bewildering varieties of dreams -
white fantails, tumblers, pigeons racing through
the dynasties of Egypt, Persia. Doves
to speed the news from bloody fields of war
to flutter strut and coo in courts of love
When Darwin's doves had fledged, like hopeful Noah
he launched them on the stormy sky to rove
and roost in places that he never saw.
Bonded to Barnacles
Extract from the Autobiography of Charles Darwin
‘On October 1846, I began work to work on Cirripedia (Barnacles) When on the coast of Chile, I found a most curious form,. ..... I worked steadily on the subject for the next eight years,... I proved the existence in certain genera of minute males complemental to and parasitic on the hermaphrodites. .... my work was of considerable use to me, when I had to discuss in the Origin of Species the principles of a natural classification.’
Darwin received a gold medal from the Royal Society for his work on barnacles
.Eight years he worked on barnacles; bizarre,
this straining at dissections so complex.
What goose would hatch and lay him golden eggs
rewarding work his strength could hardly bear?
On shoreline rocks and flotsam, live or dead,
the drifting, one eyed shrimpy infants pour
a glue, attach their heads; six walls immure
them upside down. On rising tides they spread
a net of feathery legs to sieve the sea.
He trawls for species, some are parasites,
cut down to leg-less sacs, and others hold
some tiny hangers on that prove to be
bags of sperm with penis, husband mites.
To crown it all they hang his neck with gold.Anne Bryan
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| Back to Strange Attractor homepage |
|
Darwin biography, as impartial as I can make it, without fundamentalist 'religious' disapproval or overzealous 'scientific' trumpeting of his work. |
| Monumental worms, a poem on earthworms, the subject of Darwin's last book |
| Sonnets on Darwin's work: 'Bonded to Barnacles', on the animals he studied for eight years, and 'Darwin's Loft', on the pigeons in the Origin of Species. |
| Darwin and the Heavenly Rhinoceros - a short story |
| Darwin's Voyage two poems on Darwin's five year long voyage on HMS Beagle. |
| Evolution and religion - A brief outline of some current debates |
| 'Space with Wordsworth' explores the idea that science is hostile to poetry. |
| 'Unsung by Singers' considers the scarcity of poems on science. |
