Emily Ballou, The Darwin Poems
UWA Press; $24.95; 220pp
Only the most unevolved of life forms can have failed to notice that 2009 marks the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth. That it also marks the fiftieth anniversary of C. P. Snow’s lecture ‘The Two Cultures’ is, I imagine, less well known, but for those of us who take the view that literature remains largely unadapted to the intellectual environment engendered by the ‘scientific revolution’ the concurrence is a stimulating one. For Snow identified, or claimed to have identified, a rift between ‘literary intellectuals’ on the one hand and scientists and engineers on the other, and to reconsider his influential thesis while immersing ourselves in the work of a man who was not only a great scientist but also a great writer is simply too good an opportunity to miss.
Sandwiched between two impressive quotations – one from Samuel Taylor Coleridge insisting on the necessary opposition of poetry and the sciences and one from the birthday boy himself lamenting the fact that he hadn’t devoted more of his time to poetry and music – the seventy-three poems in this collection by Sydney-based poet Emily Ballou afford an excellent point of departure for just such a reconsideration. In them, we are assured by the blurb, we are brought ‘extraordinarily close to Darwin’s life and mind’; indeed, ‘Ballou’s sensitive and beautifully imagined verse-portrait of Charles Darwin’s life saves the man from the legend’ (my emphasis). Ever on the lookout for the random mutation that augurs the birth of an exciting new species, I took up the book with trembling hands.
I wasn’t completely disappointed. The poems dealing with Darwin’s faith suffer from portentousness (I’m afraid I just don’t buy the idea of a ‘terrible secret / growing daily within him’) but contain some very striking images. In the marvellous poem ‘Ink’, for example, the fact that Darwin’s scientific discoveries at times weighed very heavily on his mind finds an unimprovable metaphor in the image of an octopus unable to lift its head from the sand; a metaphor that shades into simile when Charles is spotted shunting round his study on a black stool mounted on caster wheels, and when, in a later poem (‘Symptoms, Cures’), the scientist’s eyes are ‘overhung / by a beetling appendicium of bone / that held in place the weighty toppling brain’ (note the pun on ‘toppling’ there). Other images are less successful. Take, for example, these lines from ‘Jungle’:
The darkest parts of the jungle then
matched his mind; curved ferns bending
over an ancient water course,
Lepidoptera of thoughts hovering
at the edges of consciousness.
This reminds me of Christopher Hitchens’s complaint in Unacknowledged Legislation that the tendency among contemporary writers is to translate scientific discoveries ‘back into the safe, solipsistic patois that we already know’. Certainly Vladimir Nabokov, a talented lepidopterist, would have been dissatisfied. He wrote, ‘I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.’ Ballou, by contrast, seems wholly uninterested in what the butterflies actually are; they are simply metaphorical props – props, ironically, for the very mind that would have been consumed by them. (The abovementioned octopus, by the way, is described in fascinating detail.)
When it comes to Darwin’s family life, Ballou is on rather safer ground. Incidentally, the new British Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has gone into this subject. Here is ‘Darwin’s Wife’ in full:
7 April 1852.
Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him –
Something about that Chimpanzee over there
reminds me of you.
Not bad, but ‘Marriage’ is even better – richer and, I think, much funnier. Here, Ballou ventriloquises Emma:
we do not mind Mr Arthrobalanus, your deviant little barnacle,
nor the fact that you seem to be
increasingly cirripede-like (I have noticed your whiskers
waving at me), or even that you light your room
with luminous zoophytes at night
but I have been bothered by these strange constant leaks
of saltwater under doors
& do not speak of hermaphrodites
& double penes &c &c over the soup please,
at the very least when the children are present …
Don’t talk about reproduction in front of the children – a delicious irony if ever there was one. I would have liked a second helping.
