Poems of SCIENCE! I Mean, Science

I picked up a cheap old poetry anthology called Poems of Science, figuring there'd be some good stuff. And... there was, but I had wait for the modern conception of "science" to come about, and then spot poetry about a hundred years to come to grips with it, and decide that science is interesting and not going to go away. By that time I was more than halfway through the anthology. But around the late nineteenth century some excellent poetry starts happening, and I thought I'd share a couple links.

Miroslav Holub's Zito the Magician and Robert Browning's much longer An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician are really great and work as spec-fic stories. Swinburne's Hertha is this weird humanist we-are-made-of-star-stuff mythology that's what you'd expect from Swinburne. And then there's "Cosmic Gall", a goofy poem by John Updike which I'm gonna quote in full because it's the only thing of John Updike's I've read and liked.

Cosmic Gall

John Updike

Neutrinos, they are very small.

They have no charge and have no mass

And do not interact at all.

The earth is just a silly ball

To them, through which they simply pass,

Like dustmaids down a drafty hall

Or photons through a sheet of glass.

They snub the most exquisite gas,

Ignore the most substantial wall,

Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,

Insult the stallion in his stall,

And, scorning barriers of class,

Infiltrate you and me. Like tall

And painless guillotines they fall

Down through our heads into the grass.

At night, they enter at Nepal

And pierce the lover and his lass

From underneath the bed—you call

It wonderful; I call it crass.