Inspiration

Haiku

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Sonnet

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Free verse

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Villanelle

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Limerick

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Cinquain

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Haiku ✎ Sonnet ✎ Free verse ✎ Villanelle ✎ Limerick ✎ Cinquain ✎

There is a long history of scientific themes being explored through poetry, from Erasmus Darwin and Ada Lovelace, to Adrienne Rich and Walt Whitman. Here are some examples to whet the palate.

We Astronomers
By Rebecca Elson (2001)

We astronomers are nomads,
Merchants, circus people,
All the earth our tent.

We are industrious.
We breed enthusiasms,
Honour our responsibility to awe.

But the universe has moved a long way off.
Sometimes, I confess,
Starlight seems too sharp,

And like the moon
I bend my face to the ground,
To the small patch where each foot falls,

Before it falls,
And I forget to ask questions,
And only count things.

Plankton
by Ruth Padel (2012)

The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets.
Gelatinous ingots, rainbows of wet flinching amethyst
and flubbed, iridescent cream. All this
means he’s better; and working on a haul of lumpen light.

Polyps, plankton, jellyfish. Sea butterflies, the pteropods.
‘So low in the scale of nature, so exquisite in their forms!
You wonder at so much beauty — created,
apparently, for such little purpose!’; They lower his creel

to blue pores of subtropical ocean. Wave-flicker, white
as a gun-flash, over the blown heart of sapphire.
Peacock eyes, beaten and swollen,
tossing on lazuline steel.

(Editor’s note: in January 1832, the Beagle was heading south through the North Atlantic towards the Cape Verde Islands)

By Sara M. Sala, Instagram here.

Physics for the unwary student
by Pippa Goldschmidt (2016)

1. Imagine that you are trying to balance on the surface of an expanding balloon. List all the different ways in which this resembles reality.

2. Thousands of sub-atomic particles stream through you night and day. Does this account for those peculiar flashes of light you sometimes see?

3. You are trapped in a lift which is plummeting to the ground. Describe what you feel.

4. You are in a spaceship travelling towards a black hole. As you pass the event horizon and become cut off from the rest of the Universe, what do you observe?

5. What happens if you stop believing in gravity? Will you slide off the Earth?

6. What happens if you stop believing?

From House of Three: Logie Fielding, Pippa Goldschmidt, Nalini Paul, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: House of Three, 2016). Reproduced by permission of the author.

The Botanic Garden, A Poem in Two Parts: Part 1, The Economy of Vegetation
by Erasmus Darwin (1791) — Grandfather of Charles Darwin

Roll on, ye Stars! exult in youthful prime,
Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time;
Near and more near your beamy cars approach,
And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach; —
Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field.
Star after star from Heaven’s high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems, systems crush,
Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall,
And death and night and chaos mingle all:
— Till o’er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same!

From A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry. Routledge.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer
by Walt Whitman (1865)

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Science
by Robert Kelly (2006)

Science explains nothing
but holds all together
as many things as it can count

science is a basket
not a religion he said
a cat as big as a cat

the moon the size of the moon
science is the same as poetry
only it uses the wrong words.

Untitled
by Marie Curie (1892)

Ah! how harshly the youth of the student passes,
While all around her, with passions ever fresh,
Other youths search eagerly for easy pleasures!
And yet in solitude
She lives, obscure and blessed,
For in her cell she finds the ardor
That makes her heart immense.

But the blessed time is effaced.
She must leave the land of Science
To go out and struggle for her bread
On the grey roads of life.
Often and often then, her weary spirit
Returns beneath the roofs
To the corner ever dear to her heart
Where silent labor dwelled
And where a world of memory rested.

Curie, E. and Giustiniani, M., 1938. Madame Curie (p. 225). Paris: Gallimard (the poem was written in Polish and translated into English by Ève Curie).

Ledger
by Jane Hirshfield (2016)

Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is 3,592 measures.
A voice kept far from feeling is heard as measured.
What’s wanted in desperate times are desperate measures.
Pushkin’s unfinished Onegin: 5,446 lines.

No visible tears measure the pilot’s grief
as she Lidars the height of an island: five feet.
Fifty, its highest leaf.
She logs the years, the weathers, the tree has left.

A million fired-clay bones—animal, human—
set down in a field as protest
measure 400 yards long, 60 yards wide, weigh 112 tons.
The length and weight and silence of the bereft.

Bees do not question the sweetness of what sways beneath them.
One measure of distance is meters. Another is li.
Ten thousand li can be translated: “far.”
For the exiled, home can be translated “then,” translated “scar.”

One liter
of Polish vodka holds twelve pounds of potatoes.
What we care about most, we call beyond measure.
What matters most, we say counts. Height now is treasure.

On this scale of one to ten, where is eleven?
Ask all you wish, no twenty-fifth hour will be given.
Measuring mounts—like some Western bar’s mounted elk head—
our cataloged vanishing unfinished heaven.