Living in a Poem

(Rhyme and Rhythm, even if you can't always feel it)

Sometimes, in rare fortunate moments, I feel as if I'm living inside a poem. I don't mean that I understand anything in a special way, nor that I'm gifted with some sort of mystical epiphany. I just mean that for a short while all of my awareness is filled with rhyme, meter, metaphor, music, symbolism and that strange expansive hint of meaning beyond denotation: all the trappings of poetry.

Let me try to explain.

I've always been attracted to poetry: to the music of words and lyrics. I invented silly rhymes or parodied song lyrics long before I learned how to read and write. Lines from Dr. Seuss and songs from Disney movies jangled in my head. Some still do:

Look what we found in the park in the dark.
We will take him home. We will call him Clark.
He will live in our house and he'll grow and he'll grow
Will our mother like this? We don't know.

(I've written an homage to Dr. Seuss here)

I've also always been drawn to the shapes and colors and behaviors of plants and animals, and to their beautiful Linnaean names, invented back when scientists were still poets. Later, when I studied Latin, those names became even more beautiful as their histories and usages, their associations and folklore were revealed. Bugloss had nothing to do with the loss of bugs, but became the tongue of an ox. Daisies were still recognizable from Middle English as Day's Eyes. Platypuses had flat feet. Rhinoceri had horns on their noses.

Later, when I studied Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, even more music and poetry, metaphors and linguistic structures became apparent – quirks no longer, because they were the well-preserved physiology of earlier language forms. And though the nature of poetry evolved over the ages, the love of rhythm and metaphor always remained. To the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf poet a ship was a high-prowed wave-stepper. And the sad monster, Grendel, was a border-treader. The poet wrote in a powerful rhythm, meant to be punctuated with heavy strokes of a harp, like a coxswain. He used alliteration instead of the Norman French rhyme.

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
(Listen! We of the Spear-Danes in days of yore)
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon…
(Of those folk-kings the glory have heard…)

By the late 1300s, two hundred fifty years after the Norman conquest, the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was still using Anglo-Saxon poetic forms in the young Middle English:

SIÞEN þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye
(Since the siege and assault was ceased at Troy,
Þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondeȝ and askez…
(The burg razed and burned to brands and ashes…)

But Geoffrey Chaucer, writing around the same time, preferred the newer courtly verse forms in the Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
(When April with its sweet-smelling showers)
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
(Has pierced the drought of March to the root,)
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
(And bathed every vine in such liquid)
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
(From which flowers are engendered;)

Where am I going with this? Language evolves in ways that parallel the way life evolves. You can see many similar processes at work. Although the forces that mold language and biological evolution are quite different, they both can be characterized by "chance and necessity".¹

So, as time went by and I immersed myself more and more in biology, it should come as no surprise that I began to see parallel processes in both. Not only the evolution of language versus the evolution of Mr. Darwin's "endless forms most beautiful." But also the similarities in the forces that mold and animate living beings and poetry. I was amazed and delighted by the interlocking harmonies of ecology; by the sequential melody of embryonic development, as inevitable and infinitely varied as Bach's Inventions; and by the unbelievable flexibility and inventiveness of the immune system.

Sometimes all of this comes together. Sometimes I can sense that whales and fish are metaphors for one another (as Melville almost pointed out); that the tendencies that mold them into similar shapes are structured like the tendencies that mold prosody – rhythm, repetition, harmony, necessity.

I'm not too sure about meaning, though. I think searching for meaning is a very human attempt to grasp something that's ultimately ineffable. Rhythms exist whether or not people hear them. Shapes become similar because the geometries of the universe constrain them. And repetition is the marriage of time and order.

So, sometimes when I'm walking around my neighborhood on a windy day, I watch horse chestnut branches driven forward by the breeze and swinging back from their own spring tension, and I can almost feel a chant in the rhythm. Or I look at lavender in the sunlight, and feel melancholy because there are so few honey bees in them, and how insects are the blood cells of an ecosystem, and how anemic the ecosystem is. I may catch a Steller's jay who's gotten lost in my house (it's my fault – I feed him peanuts on my dining room table, and sometimes he gets spooked…) and notice how light he is – and how light he has to be in order to fly. And that makes me think of the sounds of the French language, and how it doesn't have hefty velar fricatives like the German ch in Bach, because, like the jay, French needs to be light in order to fly. And I think of the fungal mycelium surrounding and communicating with the roots of trees, and how like an economy and a language that is: invisible, omnipresent, and nurturing. And sometimes all these thoughts and feelings harmonize, and reflect each other, and resound on deeper and deeper levels.

It's pretty cool.

I'm not sure whether any of this is valid outside human experience – outside my own peculiar experience in particular. I'm not sure if other people feel it and call it something else. I think Plato might have said these things spring from a common Form. But I'm suspicious of Plato, since he appeared to believe in moral and aesthetic absolutes, which I find unreasonable; and besides, I don't read Greek, so I don't really understand what he was going on about. But I do think we humans, like so many other animals, are evolved to recognize patterns; and that we find similar, predictable patterns to be soothing and aesthetically pleasing: the orbits of planets, the succession of seasons, the logarithmic spirals of a sunflower, the golden mean that finds itself buried in so many shapes. So the universe is perfectly happy to mold objects and sounds and flows of all kinds into similar forms, with or without humans looking over its shoulder. And I think when we can keep a few of them in our heads for a while, we might find ourselves living in a poem.

1. "Chance and Necessity" is a phrase coined by Jacques Monod ("Le Hasard et la Nécessité"), one of the fathers of modern molecular genetics, to describe the processes of evolution.