Darwin in rhyme

Why does every gentleman not

            become an ornithologist?

Gulls and cormorants take their way home

            at evening on a wild, irregular course.

This question is posed by a childhood vist to the seasisde by the young Darwin (and seems sensible to me, birdwatcher that I am).  Ruth Padel is Charles Darwin’s great-granddaughter, and a very good poet.  In Darwin: A Life In Poems (2009) she has brought together her family history and her muse in the most engaging way.  The whole book is a poetic account of his life, from childhood to death, touching on snall incidents to illustrate major themes - apart from evolution and his natural history studies, there is much on his relationship with his wife Emma (one of the mighty Wedgwood clan), and his views on religion.  But there are also charming and distressing incidents from childhood, seeing slavery at first hand, making his first dscoveries, playing with his children, and the tragic loss of many of them, and so on and so on.  Here is the wonder of the ocean deep on H M S Beagle, after a bout of sea sickness:

 

The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets.

            Gelatinous ingots, rainbows of wet flinching amethyst

            and flubbed, iridescent cream.  All this

mean’s he’s better; and working on a load of lumpen light.

Padel's poems have a vary varied form, but all - or maybe just the mass of them taken together - have a slightly breathless quality which I found enjoyable: no need here to feel guilty about charging on, letting the meaning and the music of the words wash over you.  Indeed, I read it all, enjoying the poems, but reading the whole as if it was a sort of novel.  For those who don't know the detail of Charles darwin's life, there are simple explanatory marginalia, but you can easily ignore these if you wish.  Here Emma sees Down House for the first time:

“Ugly”, she says. “ A desolate air”.  The garden, though,

Makes up for it.  Old trees - purple magnolia, a quince,

a medlar, Spanish chestnut.  A goodish hay-meadow.

In September they’ll move in.  A child will be born,

And buried in the family plot he’ll pick at the west door

of this flint church.  Through briar rose haws, twisting petioles

of clematis will scribble these hedges like the pencil

of a ferocious toddler with glowing, ochre coloured wire.

I loved these poems.  I have always been keen on Darwin, and I feared these poems might be trivial or flubsy, but not a bit of it.  They illuminate, amuse, and tell of a very distrubed and worried man, beset by personal tragedies and religious doubts, as he quietly changed our understanding of the world for all time.

Comments

[adevotedreader]

Like yourself, I'm keen on Darwin and although interested by these poems, wasn't sure they'd be worth reading. Given you obviously think so, I must try them.