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Home > Books and reading > Poetry > Poems on the Underground > Science poems
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Science poems

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On Monday 1 February 2010 a set of Science Poems on the Underground, celebrating 350 years of the Royal Society, was posted in 3,000 Tube card spaces. The six poems reflect contrasting responses by Blake, Tennyson, and four contemporary poets to the astonishing scientific discoveries made between the 18th and 21st centuries. 
 
William Blake, from Auguries of Innocence ('To see a World in a Grain of Sand…'). Blake opposed what he saw as a barren rationalism with his own extraordinary visionary powers. While Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley incorporated the science of their times into their visions of human progress, Blake is the great anti-science poet of early Romanticism.
 
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, stanzas from In Memoriam (stanza cxxiii. Tennyson, a Fellow of the Royal Society, was fascinated by contemporary science but in famous lines lamented 'Nature red in tooth and claw.' We reprint lines about geological time from Tennyson’s elegy for his friend Arthur Hallam.
 
Also featured are four contemporary poems about space and time, earth and the heavens, the enduring mysteries of life and death:
 
‘In the microscope’ by Miroslav Holub, the Czech scientist and poet, translated by Ian Milner (permission by Dilia © Miroslav Holub-heirs c/o Dilia)
 
‘It looks so simple from a distance’ by the distinguished American/British poet Anne Stevenson, from Poems 1955-2005 (Bloodaxe 2004)
 
‘Out There’ by Jamie McKendrick, from Dark Matter: Poens of Space (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 2008)
 
 ‘Fulcrum/Writing a World’ by David Morley, from Scientific Papers (Carcanet 2002).
 
Poems on the Underground, founded in 1986, is supported by London Underground, Arts Council England, and the British Council. Poems are selected by Judith Chernaik and poets Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert. Posters, designed by Tom Davidson, are available from the Poetry Society and London’s Transport Museum, Covent Garden.