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Ruth Padel
Ruth Padel … 'Both poetry and science get at a universal insight or law through the particular.' Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
Ruth Padel … 'Both poetry and science get at a universal insight or law through the particular.' Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

The science of poetry, the poetry of science

This article is more than 12 years old
Both depend on metaphor, which is as crucial to scientific discovery as it is to lyric

"Poetry is about feeling, science is about facts. They're nothing to do with each other!" The A-level students in a school I visited last week were passionate on this point. Behind them was Keats, urging them on. "Philosophy," Keats said – meaning science – "would clip an angel's wings." Science was out to dissolve beauty, "Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine – / Unweave a rainbow …" Edgar Allen Poe agreed. Science was a "vulture" that shrivelled wonder. "Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, / The Elfin from the green grass; and from me. / The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?"

I think this over-romanticises both poetry and science, which have got on fine for two millennia and today are enriching their dialogue. Michael Symmonds Roberts's collection Corpus came out of a conversation with scientists mapping the genome. Jo Shapcott's collection Of Mutability is expanding poetry's audiences in the medical community.

Maybe the relationship between poetry and science provokes passion because it is parental. Poetry was the first written way we addressed such questions as what is the world made of, and how did it come to be? In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, the pre-socratics reworked these questions, writing on physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, theology, metaphysics and epistemology; and often in verse. Science was born in poetry. Lucretius's epic on atoms, On the Nature of Things continued this tradition; so did the 18th-century doctor Erasmus Darwin, whose poem "The Temple of Nature" outlined a theory of evolution, following life-forms from micro-organisms to human society.

The project that science had in common with explanatory verse such as this was revealing "the secrets of nature". When William Harvey described the circulation of the blood, Abraham Cowley wrote him an ode. "Harvey sought for Truth in Truth's own book, / The Creatures which by God Himself was writ." In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins does a wonderful job in arguing against Keats that far from destroying beauty, science reveals it. Last week, Siddhartha Mukherjee, who won the Guardain First Book award for his The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, delivered a moving panegyric to the narrative magic of science.

But poetry and science have more in common than revealing secrets. Both depend on metaphor, which is as crucial to scientific discovery as it is to lyric. A new metaphor is a new mapping of the world. Even maths uses metaphor; and this is where more condensed forms of poetry join in. John Donne, living through exciting new scientific discoveries, relished the door-opening powers of science. "A mathematical point is the most indivisible and unique thing which art can present," he said. His lyric uses science as image rather than exposition. But not as mere ornament. The legs of a compass as a metaphor for two lovers, the alembic as the distilling power of love, are not just surface glitter but organic to their poems: they take the thought and feeling forward.

On the metaphor front, science and poetry fertilise each other. The French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre ("poet of science," according to the Daily Express in 1913) compared putrefaction to melting ice. "The meat has become so moist that the young vermin leave a wet mark as they crawl. The swarming brood creates a sort of mist with the crossing and criss-crossing of its trails. Gradually the flesh flows in every direction like an icicle placed before the fire." A few years after Keats, Charles Darwin also gave up a medical career – and his later scientific thought was shaped by poetry. The poet he carried on expeditions through South America was Milton; 20 years later, On the Origin of Species, like Paradise Lost, takes loss – the loss of extinct species – as its starting-point.

But deeper even than metaphor is the way poetry and science both get at a universal insight or law through the particular. Darwin built his theories from scrupulous focus on tiny concrete entities. He spent seven years on barnacles before tackling a general species book. Furthermore, both arrive at the grand and abstract (when they have to) through precision. Scientists and poets focus on details. Poetry is the opposite of woolly or vague. Vague poetry is bad poetry – which, as Coleridge said, is not poetry at all. Woolly science is not science.

I was delighted those students were so passionate. "About," though, is a confusing word. Scientia means "knowledge:" science, it seems to me, is not about facts; it is about thinking about facts. Equally, poetry might or might not be driven by feeling but what it is "about" is relationships – between word and sound, word and thing, word and thought, sound and meaning, words and other words. So is science. Darwin wondered constantly about the relationships of organic forms – in earth, in stone, in what happens between red clover and bumble bees, orchid and moth.

The deepest thing science and poetry share, perhaps, is the way they can tolerate uncertainty. They have a modesty in common: they do not have to say they're right. True, perhaps. Or just truer. "A scientist should be the first to say he doesn't know," a tiger biologist told me when I asked some detail of tiger behaviour. "A scientist goes forward towards truth but never gets there."

Which is roughly what Donne said too. "On a huge hill, / Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will. / Reach her, about must, and about must go."

The Mara Crossing, Ruth Padel's new collection of poems and prose on migration, is published by Chatto & Windus in January.

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