You surprise me! I'm not a poetry aficionado but GMH has always been my favorite. I love that poem in particular. Also "God's Grandeur" (too religious for you!) which is pinned to my office wall.
GMH is a minority taste and AFAIK not in fashion. But he speaks to the moment in some ways - e.g. love of nature & the environment (see also Binsey Poplars, Spring, The Windhover - though usually conflated with religiosity) and in his person.
While we’re on the subject of physics and poetry, I’d be remiss if I didn’t quote this by Feynman:
“A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!”
You surprise me! I'm not a poetry aficionado but GMH has always been my favorite. I love that poem in particular. Also "God's Grandeur" (too religious for you!) which is pinned to my office wall.
Wait, which part is surprising? My quoting of GMH on a Sunday? Or that I'm not a poetry guy?
GMH is a minority taste and AFAIK not in fashion. But he speaks to the moment in some ways - e.g. love of nature & the environment (see also Binsey Poplars, Spring, The Windhover - though usually conflated with religiosity) and in his person.
It’s Gerard Manley Hopkins. By the way, check out his philosophy — it was rather interesting in its own way.
While we’re on the subject of physics and poetry, I’d be remiss if I didn’t quote this by Feynman:
“A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!”
It’s from this lecture: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_03.html
So many people forget (or prefer not to notice) how anti-reductionist his views were.
Like most scientists who get elevated to hero-status, people see in Feynman whatever they are looking to see. Just like that glass of wine, I suppose.