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by Hugh Cook |
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contents of this diary - contents special topics written about - topics First entry this page: this page: first entry Hugh Cook - his blog: latest entry |
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(introduces some comments about Poe and SONNET TO SCIENCE) followup Poe comments |
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As I'd never heard of any "Sonnet to Science" (I guessed, wrongly, that the poet was Keats) the answer to this question obviously wasn't on the site. In fact, an ignorant search engine had directed the searcher to a file called "text-science-fiction-story.html" which contains the following piece of dialog:- "No, though I don't like the idea, you are one of us. You are of the One True Flesh, albeit in a debased mutant form." This quote is from a story about a UFO alien invasion and the story has nothing to do with sonnets. to read UFO alien invasion story showcasing the word ALBEIT The same page contains various links including the word "sonnet," completing the defeat of what passes for "machine intelligence". Anyway, as a professional English teacher, I've been trained to sympathize with those who are baffled by unknown terms such as "albeit". (And, in this context, let me confess that my own recent dealings with medical English have been teaching me, afresh, a measure of humility in the face of the baffling immensity of the English language ... terms such as "annulus fibrosus" and "gelatinous nucleus pulposus" are as much a challenge to me as "albeit" evidently was to the searcher.) The word "albeit" is, I guess (although I haven't looked lately) splattered through the King James version of the Holy Bible, a copy of which was given to me before I was one year old. Although I haven't yet succeeded in reading the entire Holy Bible (I tried a couple of times but always got bogged down amongst the "begats") I have read chunks of it ... enough so that the old-fashioned world of "thee" and "thou" and "begatting" and all the rest of it seems reasonably natural to me, to the point where a word like "albeit" is able to infiltrate a piece of dialog in one of my SF stories, masquerading as a fragment of vernacular American speech. Anyway, let's do the English teacher bit. Definition: albeit. The meaning of "albeit" is "although". Example:- "George Bush, albeit no genius, probably knows the Holy Bible better than I do." This means:- "Even though George Bush is no genius, he probably knows more about the Holy Bible than me." Similarly:- "George Bush, albeit no genius, is no idiot." This means:- "Although George Bush is not a genius, he is not an idiot." (This represents my honest opinion of the guy. I don't think he's one of the stars of the intellectual firmament. On the other hand, I think he's smart enough to chew gum and sign treaties at the same time.) Now let's look again at the quote from my UFO alien invasion story:- "No, though I don't like the idea, you are one of us. You are of the One True Flesh, albeit in a debased mutant form." This means that "Although you are a debased mutant, you are still of the One True Flesh." (If you want to know what the One True Flesh is, you'll have to read the story.) Anyway, my curiosity having been piqued by the question of the identity of "albeit," I went in search of the "sonnet to science" to see what "albeit" might mean in context. The sonnet turns out to be by Edgar Allan Poe rather than Keats. Poe (like Keats) is a writer I can't claim to know very well (even though I once wrote a story called "The Trial of Edgar Allan Poe" which features Poe as a character.) (In this context it's worth noting, in passing, that, even in the days of our supposedly internationalized planet, literatures still tend to be nationalistic enterprises. In New Zealand, where I was educated, we don't, as a rule, pay much attention to American trifles such as Moby Dick or minor American writers such as Poe. We tend to focus, rather, on our own local giants, such as Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame. When I was traveling abroad, in England, I got a genuine shock when I was in the public library in Liverpool and saw a battered copy of a Frank Sargeson short story collection in amongst a set of unwanted books which were actually on sale to the general public.) {Note: the idea that "literatures still tend to be nationalistic enterprises" is not original. I've stolen it from somewhere, and perhaps I've even stolen the exact wording, although I can't remember where I got it from ... the introductory pages of some printed book which is sitting in the library at the University of Auckland, I think. You can turn up stuff related to this theme if you do a search engine search for "literatures nationalist enterprises" or "literatures nationalistic enterprises". The text of the Poe sonnet, a vicious diatribe maligning science, appears to be as follows:- |
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Sonnet - to Science
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! |
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Anyway, to continue with the line-by-line analysis:- (iii) Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, = [approximately] Science, why do you inflict emotional damage upon the vulnerable poet? (iv) Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? = Science, you are a vulture, focused on dull reality. (v) How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, = [Given that the above is true], how can the poet love you, Science? And for what reason should the poet think that you, Science, are wise? (vi) Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering = You, science, are the person who would not permit the poet to indulge his imagination (vii) To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, = [You would not let the poet] go looking for the valuable resources capable of being discovered in the depths of his imagination (viii) Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? = Even though he, the poet, persevered with undaunted courage. The above reading is a little bit conjectural but leaves me reasonably sure (though this took some doing!) that the "he" of "Albeit he" is the poet who is first introduced (implicitly) by the words "the poet's heart". I have to say that I don't think that this is a good sonnet. I have the following problems with it:- (a) The grammar is convoluted, to the point where it is very difficult to work out what is happening. (b) The text is unnecessarily confusing because the "wings" of "whose wings" are those of the Vulture, and the Vulture is an image for Science, whereas the "wing" of "undaunted wing" is the "wing" (which we could think of as the imaginative power) of the poet. If I were Poe's instructor, I would lecture him severely on his deficiencies, and tell him to go rewrite the sonnet. (In fact, logically, my next step should be to go rewrite the sonnet myself, and perhaps I will give it a shot over the next few weeks.) Just to wrap up, I'm vaguely aware that "Diana" is some kind of goddess associated with hunting ... looking her up, I find that she's the Princess of Wales ... sorry, that can't be right ... no, she's, as I thought, the goddess of hunting ... and a virgin, apparently ... this was a long time ago, and life, it seems, was not as we know it .... Diana's "car," of course, is a chariot, not an Edsel or a Ford Taurus. A Hamadryad (in modern English, usually with a lower-case "h") is a female entity living in a tree. A Naiad (usually with a lower-case "n") is a female entity living in flowing water. The term "Elfin" is actually an adjective, and Poe is abusing it by using it as a noun. As an English teacher, I tell my students that they can't used adjectives as nouns. If Poe were in my class (and I have to say that I think he should be) I would tell him the same thing. Some people (Poe included, apparently) think that when you write poetry you can just chuck English grammar into the garbage bin, but my profession exists to tell you that you can't. The noun which Poe needs is "elf," and when Poe writes of "The Elfin from the green grass" is sounds as if he's thinking of something small and fragile, perhaps a leprechaun - certainly not an elven lordess from Lothlorien. As for a "tamarind tree," that is the Asian tree known to science as Tamarindus indica ... given that Poe's sonnet is addressed to Science, he might properly have used Science's language at this point, rather than the vernacular. The last couple of lines are a bit odd. The poet accuses Science of having dragged "from me" (that is, "from me the poet") the "summer dream". However, this accusation is not supported by any evidence. If Poe (or some poet in whose voice Poe is writing) really was dozing off in the shade of a specimen of Tamarindus indica, then how on earth did Science enter the picture? What witnesses can Poe produce to show that Science was anywhere near the scene? If I were an attorney defending unjustly accused Science then I would be confident of rapidly reducing Poe to mincemeat once he took the witness stand. Poe doesn't make the slightest attempt at justifying his accusation. Maybe he has some evidence for it (an opinion from the CIA, perhaps?) but he hasn't yet made the evidence public. I don't know what fate Poe has in mind for Science, but it rather sounds to me as if Poe's all set to go nuke Science dead, and to do so on the basis of zero proof. Additionally, it has to be said that the accusation that it was Science that "dragged Diana from her car" seems wildly out of place. Diana, after all, was a Roman goddess, and her believers were a thing of the past long before the minions of Science started dissecting the gods with their scalpels. (Now I should go write the necessary story, Dissection of the Gods ... but where am I going to find the time?) In conclusion, then, let me say that anyone who find's Poe's sonnet to be baffling, confusing and unsatisfactory is in good company. A message to America: Poe is overrated, and this poem, this Sonnet to Science, is an embarrassment. Chuck Poe out of the poetry curriculum and put in some New Zealand poets instead. Sam Hunt is a better poet than Poe any day of the week. Followup 2004 February 13 Friday: I've had a couple of people suggest I'm being less than entirely fair to Poe, most recently L.J., who writes "Some say that this sonnet is his mocking of those who say that science is the bane of the poet's imagination". If so then Poe is obviously a bit more slippery than I thought ... L.J. suggests it might be a good idea to find EUREKA: A PROSE POEM "and read that before passing further judgment on Poe as an author". I frankly don't think I've got time to, but serious students of Poe might care to check out:- http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/eureka.html |
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