The ghost of life/Gratitude Monday: Treasure in the jewelled skies

Today I’m grateful for all the scientists in all the fields who are working all the hours God sends to find vaccines and treatments for all the viruses. They’ve been doing this forever, but you’re only noticing them now because of the current pandemic. Many of them are even doing it not to make squillions for big pharma.

So today’s National Poetry Month entry is a sonnet from…Edgar Allan Poe.

Yes, he’s bitching about science dispelling all the mysteries and myths, but I think he’s missing the point. Scientists explore, they pioneer, they open millions of new doors and pathways. They make the universe bigger even as they burst the bubbles of ignorance and superstition. Poe might whine about being prevented from speculating, but that’s a self-created limitation, IMO. He may well have been having a bad day. He had rather a lot of them.

“To Science”

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

   Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

   Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

   Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

   Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,

   And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

   Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?