This poem by the grandfather of Charles Darwin, poet/naturalist Erasmus Darwin, is one that I hadn’t known until I ran across it while trying to discover which poems the line beginning with “Roll on, thou” came from. This would, in my opinion the most fascinating of the poems recited by our overworked friend Robert Reese, except that he probably didn’t.
Alas, it turns out that Robert probably wasn’t thinking of this poem, as the words “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue” are from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. I prefer to think that for just those two words “Roll on,” Robert was thinking of this one.
Darwin states the delightful goal of his poem The Loves of the Plants, as “to Inlist Imagination under the banner of Science.” The poem is one of two that Darwin published in a book called The Botanic Garden in 1791. The first poem, The Economy of Vegetation, celebrates recent scientific discoveries and posits some of Darwin’s own theories on scientific matters. The second poem, Loves of the Plants, praises and improvises upon Carl Linnaeus’s plant classification scheme. There is a pretty good Wikipedia page about this fascinating poem for those who would like to learn more.
From The Botanic Garden, The Loves of the Plants, Part i
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802)
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 center 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.