Sherry Chandler

“HENCE when a Monarch or a mushroom dies,
Awhile extinct the organic matter lies;
But, as a few short hours or years revolve,
Alchemic powers the changing mass dissolve;
Born to new life unnumber’d insects pant,
New buds surround the microscopic plant;
Whose embryon senses, and unwearied frames,
Feel finer goads, and blush with purer flames;
Renascent joys from irritation spring,
Stretch the long root, or wave the aurelian wing.

“When thus a squadron or an army yields,
And festering carnage loads the waves or fields;
When few from famines or from plagues survive,
Or earthquakes swallow half a realm alive; —
While Nature sinks in Time’s destructive storms,
The wrecks of Death are but a change of forms;
Emerging matter from the grave returns,
Feels new desires, with new sensations burns;
With youth’s first bloom a finer sense acquires,
And Loves and Pleasures fan the rising fires. —
Thus sainted PAUL, “O Death!” exulting cries,
‘Where is thy sting? O Grave! thy victories?’

This passage, Harry Rutherford tells us, is “from Canto IV of The Temple of Nature, where [Erasmus] Darwin comes within a whisker of stating the principle of natural selection.”

Harry has a most interesting review of a new biography by Desmond King-Hele of this grandfather to Charles Darwin over at Heraclitean Fire. Says Harry of this passage of poetry:

I love the cheeky jabs at both royalty and religion; firstly in lumping together a monarch and a mushroom as comparable lumps of organic matter, and then the way he implies that acting as compost for plants and food for insects is what St Paul had in mind with ‘Oh Death! Where is thy sting?’ But there is also a kind of slightly nutty grandeur to the poetry.

The whole review is worth a read, both for the perspective it gives us on the more [in]famous Darwin, and for a look at the man himself, who was.

a doctor by trade, and one of the most highly rated in the country, but was one of those classic Enlightenment figures whose interests included botany, meteorology, physics, chemistry, engineering, philosophy and just about anything else that came his way. And for a few years he was the most successful and critically acclaimed poet in England.

It’s the first of November, Hallowmass on the Catholic calendar (though pop culture has tended to keep the Eve and forget the mass), and the beginning of the dark time of year. It’s not for nothing that Moby Dick begins with Ishmael’s description of “a damp,
drizzly November in my soul.”

Though, considering that we are still in a state of drought, a damp and drizzly November would not be entirely unwelcome around here.

Still officially fall but my bank calendar, whose page I just turned, shows a photo of a buck in a snowy pine woods. Not the most original concept, I’ll grant you. Nevertheless, I thought I’d mark the turning of the month with another of the winter poems Charlie Whitt sent me:

PINES

Wind rising in the pines
Carries the sounds of winter to the window
As I struggle to find warmth beneath the chilling image.

Needle fingers stitch pale portraits upon the horizon
Pausing to fix them within cool fluid.

I depend upon the pines to tell of changes
For they know cold better than me,

And they know when to bend;
When to call out a warning.

— Charles M. Whitt