Surely no one could doubt that the discourse of atomic physics changed utterly at 8:15 A.M. on Monday, 6 August 1945. Nuclear fission had only been definitively accomplished seven years before, and its use for a bomb, rather than for the positive energy source that some theorists had imagined, was the result of the secret laboratory work of a few physicists and government sponsors. 1 The U.S. bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented not only a shift in global political power, but also a major change in what Tom Wilkie calls "the style of science"—from the "era of the great university laboratories" (such as Ernest Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge) to the era of "big science," of Los Alamos. 2 But perhaps the biggest transformation occurred in the way the public came to understand atomic physics. The popular vision of the discipline as arcane and theoretical—as characterized by X rays and obscure energy sources—was replaced by horrific images from Hiroshima: human bodies turned to ashes or shadows; people who were not even at the bomb site suffering from a mysterious, incurable illness; and people at ground zero who saw the flash but heard nothing while others miles away heard a deafening blast. In other words, one could no longer speak of atomic physics without also speaking of biology, of bodies.
One of the many people who groped for a vocabulary with which to understand Hiroshima was Edith Sitwell, whose "Three Poems of the Atomic Age" consisted of "Dirge for the New Sunrise," "The Shadow of Cain," and "The Canticle of the Rose." 3 These poems were perhaps the strongest works of the last phase of her career, although the most sustained discussion of them has primarily focused on their religious implications. 4 Certainly Sitwell would have approved of the perceptive religious readings of the nature of guilt in her poems, but the tight focus upon theology seems not to have permitted these scholars to consider the vast array of scientific concepts invoked in the poems as science. Rather, they are treated (if they are examined at all) as symbols for religious concepts. 5 The wide range of scientific texts evoked in these poems should, however, be given as much weight as the religious themes. Indeed, revisiting Sitwell's later work provides an argument for her significance not simply as a poet characterized by her early radical sound and word experiments in Façade, her eccentric dress and self-presentation, and her endless skirmishes with The Movement over the legacy of modernism, but rather as a thinker who complicates our sense of the interaction between public and scientific cultures in the immediate post-World War II era. Sitwell's atomic bomb poems, and "The Shadow of Cain" most strikingly, muster an array of scientific texts from several centuries to trace the role of the organic in the now-dangerous atomic order. They argue for a reintegration of the organic with the inorganic, of biology, natural history, and ethics with physics. She strategically uses alchemy and other discredited sciences to critique the conceptual bifurcation of the organic and inorganic worlds that in modern atomic physics had led to such lethal consequences.
Sitwell recognized that the bomb almost instantaneously caused a shift in the broader public perception of physics—one that entailed a serious rethinking of the roles of biology and of life itself in the seemingly cold and intellectually detached realm of atomic physics. The blurring of the disciplinary boundary between modern physics and biology had certainly occurred before. Evelyn Fox Keller has chronicled the debate that the Second Law of Thermodynamics caused "concerning the place of living systems in the laws of physics." 6 The search for increasingly efficient steam engine models, ones that could transform heat into mechanical energy without loss of energy, led to the Second Law, which very quickly entailed a number of different and vexing concerns for scientists and the general public during the Victorian and even the modernist period. One of the most prominent issues was what Hermann von Helmholtz called "thermal death." As Ernest Rutherford asserted half a century later, "Science offers no escape from the conclusion of Kelvin and Helmholtz that the sun must ultimately grow cold and this earth become a dead planet moving through the intense cold of empty space." 7 Fears of inevitable, frigid planetary death racked res from Charles Darwin (who lamented that millions of years of evolution would end in the natural cooling of the planet) to H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence. 8
As this example demonstrates, scientific "breakthroughs" can precipitate crises. Different scientific discourses—or science and other discourses—seem incompatible, and micro- and macro-level explanations do not appear to be reconcilable. I want to argue that the atomic bomb precipitated such a moment. Physics, the life sciences, and understandings of human agency in the natural world seemed to reel from what Sitwell clearly perceived as the simultaneously moral and scientific blow of nuclear fission.
Atomic physics had provoked the imagination in primarily positive ways before the bomb. Countless people marveled at seeing through opaque matter with X rays, and wondered about the possibilities of mysterious energy rays. In the 1930s Sitwell herself had turned to atomic energy as a positive metaphor for the power of modernism. Praising T. S. Eliot's work, she asserts:
The older beauty, the beauty of the old masters, is the beauty of species and mass—the new beauty is highly individualised and separate. The modern artist is not concerned with things in the mass, he is passionately interested in the fulfilling of the destinies of the single individuals that make up the mass—whether these individuals are men, or leaves, or waves of the sea. The great quality of the old masters is force, used in the scientific term of the word—the binding together of the molecules of the world. That is partly what makes their sense of design so tremendous. The great quality of the modern masters is an explosive energy, the separating up of the molecules, exploring the possibilities of the atom.
This is at once the quality and the danger of pioneer poetry. The aim of the modernist poets—the constant aim—is to reconcile this necessity of exploring the possibilities of the atom with the necessity for logical design and form. 9
Portraying modernism in terms of individualism, antimass sentiments, and iconoclasm was nothing new. These terms had been around since before Sitwell had first appeared on the London scene during World War I. But Sitwell moves into unusual territory as well, exploring individualism and energy with atomic-age metaphor, combining modernist "pioneering" with scientific exploration.
But when the bomb made the concentrated release of radioactivity into a destructive reality, and not just an optimistic metaphor, Sitwell was forced to turn the clock as far back from 1945 as the sixteenth century in order to rethink the relationship between biology and atomic physics. The life sciences and physics for the most part had gone their separate ways, and nineteenth-century evolutionary models of life largely dissociated themselves from—and displaced—religious dogma. After the bomb, though, Sitwell rejected the twentieth-century atomic physics that had contributed to its creation. She seems to have read Albert Einstein and Cambridge astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, but I find no evidence in the poems or notebooks of her grappling with the studies of Rutherford, Frederick Soddy, Enrico Fermi, or Niels Bohr, for instance. 10 Rather, after exploring the natural history of the planet in works by nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Ernst Haeckel, Charles Lyell, and Lorenz Oken, she turned to much older texts, including the seventeenth-century natural history treatise of Thomas Burnet and, most markedly, the sixteenth-century alchemical writings of Paracelsus. These thinkers united physics, the life sciences, and religion into seamless systems.
It is no coincidence that Sitwell would turn to alchemical writings. Alchemy had often been invoked in the early years of atomic physics: Rutherford's 1899 experiments showed that decaying radioactive elements could induce radioactivity in other substances, and with Soddy he discovered that thorium was transmuting itself into helium. 11 As Linda Henderson notes:
Although Rutherford cautiously used the terms "transformation" and "sub-atomic chemical changes" in his publications, he would later title his [1937] book on radioactivity The Newer Alchemy. By contrast, Soddy, a chemist with a prior interest in alchemy, immediately cultivated the association of radioactivity with alchemy in his lectures, his articles and, ultimately, his 1909 book, The Interpretation of Radium. Soddy even suggested in print that radium might be the alchemist's long-sought "Philosopher's Stone," capable of transmuting metals and serving as well as the "elixir of life." [DC, 23]
Modern popularizers of alchemy likewise saw the discovery of radioactive decay as evidence confirming their beliefs (DC, 24-5). Yet the atomic paths pursued by Rutherford and his successors led not to productive and life-giving transmutation, but rather to the most powerful weapon ever used. Just as alchemy had been used as a positive conceptualization of atomic science before the bomb, so Sitwell strategically redeployed one of the most famous of all alchemists to reconre the orientation and responsibilities of nuclear physics.
In the nuclear age, her atomic bomb poems suggest, gold represents the human greed that causes wars (the biblical res in the poems, Dives and Cain, symbolize this drive for material gain); the Sun symbolizes the extreme heat of the bomb blast; and alchemy evokes the horrific transformations of elements and bodies by atomic physics and the hidden secret essences of elements that the "newer alchemy" had discovered could damage or transform the hidden, genetic essences of life through radiation sickness, cancer, and birth defects. 12 However, Sitwell reevaluates and transres each of these terms by returning to early modern science. For Burnet, the conflagration of the earth is only a natural step toward salvation. For Paracelsus, alchemy was a healing art: gold is the quintessence of the sun, and is linked to the cure for leprosy, a disease that rots the ailing body just as radiation burns the flesh. Thus, for Sitwell, Hiroshima and Nagasaki come to represent a kind of self-inflicted leprosy.
Sitwell's unpublished notebooks show her writing and rewriting the atomic bomb poems—sometimes dozens of times—as well as dictating reading lists to herself and making notes on the texts that ultimately were incorporated into these poems. Her notebooks and the poems' final published versions suggest that she conceived not of a physics that exempts life from its calculations (as Kelvin reluctantly posited), but rather of one that restores life to a central place. 13 The return to early modern science was not a naïve reactionary diatribe against contemporary science, but rather an imaginative call for modern physics (and the society that employs it) to rethink the segregation of the sciences from each other and to focus on the larger picture in an essentially ethical way.
To illustrate this call for scientific reintegration, I will focus on "The Shadow of Cain," which contains the fullest elaboration of Sitwell's scientific synthesis. The poem's introductory stanzas initiate the wide range of scientific perspectives and natural phenomena that she wished to combine. The poem is set in a biting cold that would seem to be the obverse of the destructive heat of the atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: "Under great yellow flags and banners of the ancient Cold / Began the huge migrations / From some primeval disaster in the heart of Man." 14 Just as earlier intellectuals had worried about the heat death of the planet, Sitwell begins the poem with a strident but chronologically nebulous evocation of extreme cold and its consequences. Her approach recalls the Christian concept of the Fall, but also employs words that connote the scientific discourses to follow. "Huge migrations" and "primeval" seem more related to the discourse of natural history and evolution than to Genesis, and "ancient Cold," while seeming to reverse the temporal direction of the heat death of the planet, introduces a concept that will immediately be taken up again in several scientific paradigms. 15
Major nineteenth-century texts on natural history and evolutionary biology inspire the poem's vision of the interconnectedness of organic and inorganic processes in the history of the planet. In the second stanza, the coldness is linked to terms directly out of natural history texts: "There were great oscillations / Of temperature. . . . You knew there had once been warmth" (CP, 366). These lines (and many of the following stanzas) allude to Charles Lyell's magnum opus, Principles of Geology. Lyell used the systematic study of fossil and geological evidence to conclude that plant and animal species had come into being and become extinct throughout millions of years of geographical and climatic change before any human had walked the earth. His conclusion predated Darwin's evolutionary writings and helped to cause the crisis of faith that famously inspired Tennyson's bleakest moments in In Memoriam. 16 Yet, responding some hundred years later to the same passages from Lyell that Tennyson read, Sitwell does not seem uncomfortable with the fact of evolution. She was reading Darwin while working on drafts of "The Shadow," but beyond a single reference to Darwin in a passage seemingly taken from Thomas Huxley's Lectures on Evolution , Darwin does not seem to have significantly influenced these poems.
In her notes for the essay, "The Making of a Poem II: The Shadow of Cain," Sitwell writes, "In Sir Charles Lyell's 'Geology,' there is a description of the finding of a mammoth's tooth with a pine-leaf, symbol that there had once been warmth, hid in the crevice. He speaks too of the variation in temperature in that early stage of the earth's history." 17 In the sixth and seventh stanzas of the published poem, Sitwell provides imagistic specificity to the concept:
And now, in memory of great oscillations
Of temperature in that epoch of the Cold,
We found a continent of turquoise, vast as Asia
In the yellowing airs of the Cold: the tooth of a mammoth;
And there, in a gulf, a dark pine-sword
To show there had once been warmth and the gulf stream in our veins
Where only the Chaos of the Antarctic Pole
Or the peace of its atonic coldness reigns. [CP, 366-7]
In volume one of Principles of Geology, Lyell explores the fossil evidence of the mammoth to demonstrate gradual climate shifts on the planet and their effect on different species. He rules out the mammoth as a migratory species, refuting the theory that they went extinct as the climate first became colder, and concludes that "The increasing cold, and greater frequency of inclement winters, would at last thin [the mammoths], and their final extirpation would be consummated by the rapid augmentation of other herbivorous quadrupeds more fitted for the new climate." 18 Though the description may seem callous, for Lyell—and indeed for Sitwell—the fossils merely write a chapter in the history of natural climate change and species adaptability.
Sitwell does not explicitly cite Lyell in her published notes to the poem, but his presence is felt in the poem's multiple allusions to "primal" and "primeval" "disasters" of climate and glaciation (stanza ten), and its many allusions to now extinct species, such as the mammoth (stanza six), megatherium mylodon (stanza nine), mastodon (stanzas nine and twenty-one), and pterodactyl (stanza eleven). But in revising the general statement "there had once been warmth" to "there had once been warmth and the gulf stream in our veins," Sitwell not only emphasizes human morality (not a feature of Lyell's writing), but also makes humanity part of the larger natural history of the planet rather than a separate, superior history.
To provide a vision of human beings and their ancestors as part of a natural organic and inorganic world, Sitwell turned from Lyell to another evolutionist, Ernst Haeckel. He is present (if unacknowledged) throughout the early passages of "Shadow." Sitwell copied multiple passages from his The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (or Die Welträthsel [1900]) into her notes, and grappled with his discussion of Pithecanthropus erectus in a number of revisions of "Shadow." 19 Haeckel, who taught at Jena, was a nineteenth-century zoologist who fought against religious dogma for the validity of evolutionary theory. Like Sitwell, he desired a greater integration of the sciences into philosophy. "Unfortunately," he argued, "this vast progress of empirical knowledge in our 'Century of Science' has not been accompanied by a corresponding advancement of its theoretical interpretation—that higher knowledge of the causal nexus of individual phenomena which we call philosophy" (RU, v). Calling for a "philosophy of nature" that would go beyond pure empirical research, but that would use research to ground what he saw as the merely abstract philosophical musings of the metaphysicians, Haeckel developed a theory of "Monistic Philosophy" that reconciled these seemingly disparate projects.
Haeckel clearly saw himself as exploring the consequences of Darwin's theories of evolution and natural selection. In a chapter on "The History of Our Species," he writes a brief history of evolutionary thought, praising Lyell, Lamarck, and Darwin for breaking theological fetters. 20 He lauds his own work, General Morphology of Organisms and his popularizing Natural History of Creation , for addressing "one of the most pressing of the many important tasks which Darwin proposed to modern biology . . . the reform of the zoological and botanical system" (RU, 80). In these earlier books, he argued that the "history of the embryo (ontogeny) must be completed by a second, equally valuable, and closely connected branch of thought—the history of the race (phylogeny)" (ibid.). He affirms the "theory of the descent of man from the ape" from Lamarck, Darwin, and others, and uses paleontology, ontogeny, and morphology to sketch an ancestral tree for humans as far back as "Silurian fishes" (RU, 83-4).
Haeckel's emphasis on phylogeny and biological systems influenced Sitwell's notes and drafts of "Shadow," and she worked materials from his chapter on "The History of Our Species" directly into the poem. In notebook 61, Sitwell took notes on Haeckel's evolutionary sequence:
Pithecanthropus erectus. P.71 Haeckel. The Mesozoic mammals. The Triassic period, the marsupials in the Jurassic. Eocene (period?) Miocene.
During the Pliocene period arises the Ape-Man without speech (the pithecanthropus alalus). Meso[crosses out "zoic" and writes "lithic"] Stone Age between paleolithic and neolithic. Mesophyll: Danei [?] of leaf; mesozoic: [?] [?] geological period / Paleontology: study of extinct organized beings. [N, 61]
Sitwell copied directly from the end of the chapter a passage on Pithecanthropus erectus, which Haeckel saw as important because it "served to elucidate the origin of the placentals related to our own stem, the legion of primates" (RU, 86). Sitwell wrote:
The most famous and most interesting of these discoveries is the fossil ape-man of Java, the much-talked-of pithecanthropus erectus, found by a Dutch military doctor, Eugen Dubois, in 1894. It is in truth the much-sought "missing link," supposed to be wanting in the chain of primates, which stretches unbroken from the lowest catarrhinæ, to the highest-developed man. I have dealt exhaustively with the significance of this discovery in the paper which I read on August 26th, 1898, at the Fourth International Zoological Congress at Cambridge.[. . .] The palæontologist, who knows the conditions of the formation and preservation of fossils, will think the discovery of this pithecanthropus an unusually lucky accident. The apes, being arboreal, seldom came into the circumstances (unless they happened to fall into the water) which would secure the preservation and petrifaction of their skeleton. Thus, by the discovery of this fossil man-monkey of Java the descent of man from the ape has become just as clear and certain from the palæontological side as it was previously from the evidence of comparative anatomy and ontogeny. We now have all the principal documents which tell the history of our race. [N, 61]
Haeckel's certitude regarding his ability to "tell the history of our race" seems to have inspired the scientific confidence that Sitwell needed to ground her religious poem firmly in a dynamic and developing natural world.
Early drafts of stanzas eight, nine, and ten of "Shadow" more explicitly allude to the passage she copied from Riddle and provide a more detailed sense of Sitwell's debt to Haeckel than the published poem does. There are three notebooks (61, 64, and 310) that contain drafts of passages inspired by Haeckel. Notebook 310, probably the earliest of the three, situates his phylogeny in the larger context of inorganic processes:
During the era of the Eocene
Tertiary formations, when the Pampean
mud was formed, where the Megatherium Mylodon
lies buried
- - - - - -
After the slow upheaval and subsidence of a race
During the Pliocene Period, arose the Ape-Man
That has no speech, Pithecanthropus Erectus . . .We would have liked to have stretched a hand out to
Each other, but had forgottenThe nature of Death sank
Sank into the saps of the world in our great spring.I feel sometimes as if my tongue had been melted by the dust of Death
These deformities
Arisen from cosmic causes . . . from the influence
of the external inorganic world from oscillations
of [?], the violence fallen from vermillion
Processions of suns [N, 310] 21
Most of these stanzas were not published, but were early drafts of what finally was published as stanzas nine and ten. From Lyell-inspired thought about the procession of eras and formation of sediment and fossil remains of extinct creatures (the megatherium), Sitwell turns to Haeckel to invoke human ancestors that were like us but could not speak, only to compare them to the current breakdown in communication after the bomb. Communication and human compassion, the stretching out of hands, has been forgotten in the face of death. But Sitwell then res death as part of a process that also involves the renewal of life through sap and spring. Death and inorganic processes (such as the climatic changes Lyell describes)—the "influence of the external inorganic world"—are brought into a picture of cosmic proportions. They are, perhaps, a kind of consolation in this early draft, precisely because they were not caused by humans. The manipulation of the inorganic world by nuclear fission creates a violent "procession of suns" that has no meaning in the larger geological and biological history.
The version in notebook 61 encompasses what became stanza nine in the published poem (and correctly names Pithecanthropus alalus), but also includes a passage that eventually was transformed into stanza six of the published version, firmly tying Lyell's geological vision to Haeckel's phylogeny. 22 Finally, the version in notebook 64 (which is too long to quote in full), brings together several versions of stanza six (the turquoise, pine-sword, glaciation/oscillation stanza), with versions of stanza ten and other stanzas containing allusions to Pithecanthropus alalus. It also bring together elements of stanzas ten and eleven of the published version, introducing the "iron-wing" allusion to the airplane that dropped the bomb with the eventually omitted Pithecanthropus erectus passage:
Most ancient is the Race of the Dead. . . . their blood is coldFor the heat of those more recent upon the earth
Is higher . . . the blood-beat of the bird more high than that of Man
Or that the ancient race of primeval Tigers . . .
The earth had, lived without the bird . . .
_______
but now lies flat beneath the iron wing . . .
We passed through the
and came
To Pithecanthropus erectus
Then came the terrible Spring—
The spirit will[?] light, the physical revelation
the flowers that hang like great thunders in the air . . .
And the sound of the ancestral voices
Amid the caverns where our blood begins
And in the inner leaf of the heart the mesophyll felt the warmth [N, 64]
Sitwell seemed to have had in mind a kind of natural history lesson for the poem. The development of human beings from not only prehuman primates, but even preprimate animals, the extinction and change of species as a constant rule of nature, the effect of the inorganic on those processes, the development of speech in the ancient past with Pithecanthropus erectus: all of these echoes of nineteenth-century evolutionary biology and paleontology seem aimed at creating a sense of our embeddedness in the larger organic and even inorganic schemes of the planet.
In the poem's published version little remains of Sitwell's detailed notes on Haeckel, or of her early drafts. But the will to read
The trace of the first letters we could not read:
Some message of Man's need
And of the slow subsidence of a Race;
And of great heats in which the Pampean mud was formed,
In which the Megatherium Mylodon
Lies buried under Mastodon-trumpetings of leprous Suns [CP, 367]
signifies Haeckel's presence. The shift from Pithecanthropus alalus to Pithecanthropus erectus in Haeckel is consigned to a past in which "There was still some method of communication / Between Man and his brother Man," and the challenge for humanity now is not to subside into silence and cold (ibid.). But the sense of migration, quest, and even paleontological and geological expedition that Sitwell had, in part, borrowed from Lyell changes here as she moves mankind into a prehistory charted by Haeckel.
Haeckel, though, had more to offer than the consolations of paleontology (one draft in notebook 64 had lamented: "And we were left with our Paleontology— / Our cold study of that most ancient race, the race of the Dead"). Some elements of his work could be tied into another aspect of the poem: physics. Sitwell wanted a greater sense of interconnected system than Lyell, Darwin, or even Haeckel's zoology could provide, so she also turned to aspects of Haeckel's work that asked larger questions about the realm of physics. In the draft of another omitted stanza, she writes:
It was the time of Love.
The meeting of atoms . . . Love, in the summer grass . . .
In the halls of tenements
It was the time of love . . .
The accidental collision of motes in the light of the sun [N, 64]
It is unclear where Sitwell was headed with these lines, but they seem to raise two possibilities: that love, one of the most revered human emotions, is simply a "meeting of atoms," an "accidental collision of motes in the light of the sun," or that the fortuitous concourse of atoms in fact has a principle behind it that might be described in terms of love.
These lines may have been inspired by Sitwell's readings of Haeckel's attempt to link the animate and inanimate. She frequently wrote a list of page numbers in the front or back of a book for passages she found especially interesting. Apart from the Pithecanthropus discussion, the passages that she marked in Haeckel all tend to involve his attempts to bridge seemingly separate, irreconcilable worlds. In one passage he unites the plant and animal kingdoms, and then goes even further—returning to Spinoza to help propound his own monism. Haeckel writes:
Every single object in the world which comes within the sphere of our cognizance, all individual forms of existence, are but special transitory forms—accidents or modes of substance. These modes are material things when we regard them under the attribute of extension (or "occupation of space"), but forces or ideas when we consider them under the attribute of thought (or "energy"). To this profound thought of Spinoza our purified monism returns after a lapse of two hundred years; for us, too, matter (space-filling substance) and energy (moving force) are but two inseparable attributes of the one underlying substance.
By Einstein's era, matter and energy had indeed come to be seen as something like "two inseparable attributes of the one underlying substance." Sitwell felt that the cold abstraction of mass/energy conversion had somehow contributed to the nuclear holocaust, though, and Haeckel had something much more sweeping in mind—"energy" could also include "thought" or human sentience.
In another passage that Sitwell marked in her edition, Haeckel speaks of atoms and molecules, fundamental building blocks, in terms of a principle of attraction that sounds very much like the stanza on love that she omitted from her poem:
Goethe, in his classical romance, Affinities, compared the relations of pairs of lovers with the phenomenon of the same name in the formation of chemical combinations. The irresistible passion that draws Edward to the sympathetic Ottilia, or Paris to Helen, and leaps over all bounds of reason and morality, is the same powerful "unconscious" attractive force which impels the living spermatozoon to force an entrance into the ovum in the fertilisation of the egg of the animal or plant—the same impetuous movement which unites two atoms of hydrogen to one atom of oxygen for the formation of a molecule of water. This fundamental unity of affinity in the whole of nature, from the simplest chemical process to the most complicated love story, was recognised by the great Greek scientist Empedocles, in the fifth century B.C., in his theory of "the love and hatred of the elements." It receives empirical confirmation from the interesting progress of cellular psychology, the great significance of which we have only learned to appreciate in the last thirty years. On those phenomena we base our conviction that even the atom is not without a rudimentary form of sensation and will, or, as it is better expressed, of feeling (æsthesis) and inclination (tropesis)—that is, a universal "soul" of the simplest character. The same must be said of the molecules which are composed of two or more atoms. Further combinations of different kinds of these molecules give rise to simple and, subsequently, complex chemical compounds, in the activity of which the same phenomena are repeated in a more complicated form. 23
Here Haeckel has departed from cold paleontology and hard science to express a version of physics that had few adherents in the twentieth century, one in which volition, love, soul, and desire still had a place.
Sitwell found, and extensively marked, one other source from nineteenth-century science that would attempt the kind of synthesis of the sciences and the mind that Haeckel advocated. Lorenz Oken, though now obscure, was seen (along with Joseph Schelling and Henrich Steffens) as one of the major Naturphilosophen. 24 Naturphilosophie, a movement in the sciences during the first third of the nineteenth century, was a loose combination of Kantian dynamism (which Kenneth Caneva describes as "the notion that matter is defined in terms of opposing attractive and repulsive forces") and philosophical Romanticism, whose primary goal was to challenge mechanistic explanations of nature, particularly Newtonian physics. 25 Haeckel's appropriation of Goethe's notion of affinity in the natural world seems to follow this line of science. In a way that would clearly be attractive to Sitwell in her appraisal of atomic physics, Romantic science (as Mullen calls it) tended to substitute biology for physics as the major discipline. Moreover, as Mullen explains, the Naturphilosophen held "that there is an identity of nature and spirit, and that there is an underlying unity of organic and inorganic nature" ("RS," 382). Oken sought to theorize such a unity, and his works were of major importance to nineteenth-century attacks on mechanistic science. 26 He attracted not only Goethe's (briefly admiring) attention, but also that of Coleridge, who extensively annotated his copies of First Ideas and the Compendium, the same work to which Sitwell would turn in 1946 as a philosophical anchor for her atomic bomb poems. 27
Sitwell's copy of Oken's Compendium was translated in English as Elements of Physiophilosophy . As Mullen puts it, Elements "stands as the best known of all nature philosophy books" ("RS," 388). Its first part, "Mathesis," propounded a cosmological principle of generation through primal tensions initially between zero, or nonbeing, and its opposite, being. Its second part, "Ontology," examined inorganic nature, viewing the creation of the world as a process of crystallization resulting from activity in the aether. Finally, the last section, "Biology" (a word Oken coined), posited living nature as a process of constant transformation and attempts to approximate archetypes. 28
Sitwell marked pages and passages throughout her copy of Elements of Physiophilosophy and seems to have read most of its 665 pages. 29 It was a major influence on "Shadow" and "The Canticle of the Rose." Oken saw mathematics as a place from which to begin making a theory for the most simple of relations, that between being and nonbeing. 30 In notebook 64, Sitwell transcribed passages from the beginning of "Mathesis," in particular from its first section, which was provocatively entitled "Nothing." She notes, drawing from Oken's proposition 34, "(Mathematics Oken is a something in relation to 0. The first act towards realization or the becoming something, is an origination of Many. All reality can, therefore, manifest itself only in multiplicity" (N, 64). And she then copies out the following lines from Oken's proposition 37: "What zero is in infinite intensity, that are numbers in an endless extensity. Zero is of two forms: under the ideal it is mere intensity; under the real mere extensity, or a series of numbers. The latter is only expanded intensity, the former, extensity concentrated on the point" (ibid.).
Oken began the "Nothing" section with a line that Sitwell directly echoes in "Shadow": "The highest mathematical idea, or the fundamental principle of all mathematics is the zero=0. The whole science of mathematics depends upon zero. Zero alone determines the value in mathematics. Zero is in itself nothing. Mathematics is based upon nothing, and, consequently, arises out of nothing" (EP, 5). The primal tensions between nonbeing and being are generative. Sitwell works these ideas directly into stanzas three, four, and five of "Shadow":
But the Cold is the highest mathematical Idea . . . the Cold
is Zero—The Nothing from which arose
All Being and all variation. . . . It is the sound too high for our hearing, the Point that flows
Till it becomes the line of Time . . . an endless positing
Of Nothing, or the Ideal that tries to burgeon
Into Reality through multiplying. . . . Then Time froze
To immobility and changed to Space. [CP, 366]
She grafts the idea of the absence of heat—the cold that she had already invoked in geological and paleontological terms that recall anxieties about thermal death—onto Oken's key concept of zero. Space (extension), time (sequence of numbers), motion (oscillation), and causality—all are effects of the simple positive generation from zero. 31 Sitwell's early drafts of what eventually became "But the Cold is the highest mathematical Idea . . . the cold is Zero—" played with various permutations of Oken's theorizing:
The cold is Infinity; a repetition of the Ideal . . . an incessant positing of the Idea . . .
The cold is the highest mathematical Idea, Zero
The cold is infinity . . . an incessant positing of the ideal, the becoming something . . .
What Zero is in infinite intensity
Numbers are in endless extensity. [N, 64]
Sitwell continues Oken's logic, making a kind of positive virtue out of the absolute cold and extreme heat of atomic physics. Nothing creates "All Being and all variation," which creates a sequence, "the line of Time . . . an endless positing / of Nothing." 32
Oken's mathematical physics quickly move beyond the kind of cosmological questions with which Sitwell begins her poem, into labyrinthine explications of physics, geology, and biology. Sitwell noted passages on metals, crystallization, minerals, and jewels, as well as the optics of the eye, but she also marked many passages about the plant and animal kingdoms. Many of these contain rich statements that convey the kind of interconnectedness that she wished to reassert between the sciences. Oken clearly saw the animal world as more complex than that of the plant. 33 However, many of the passages that Sitwell marked are preoccupied with theories of plant life as simple yet rich systems:
1164. Root and stem are the water- and earth-plant, the leaf is the air-plant, the flower is the light- or rather fire-plant.
1165. In the flower the problem has been solved, of producing an entire plant simply by the light without earth, water, and air, or as it were in a merely spiritual manner.
1166. The plant is a flower that has been posited under three ideas, under the idea of earth, water, and air. As in aether or fire all the elements are dissolved; so are all the elements of the plant in the flower.
1167. The flower is truly, not merely in idea, the whole plant with all systems and formations, posited under a single idea, under that of the aether, namely, of the gravity, light and heat, or the fire.
1168. The flower as the aether-organ of the plant is not so independent as an animal, but subordinated to the planetary systems, being only a separation of the parts of the trunk, not a new formation, as in the animal kingdom. [EP, 229-30]
From these passages arose some of the language and some parts of the conceptual scheme of "The Canticle of the Rose," the third of Sitwell's atomic bomb poems. Stanzas two and three have the "Rose upon the wall" crying:
I rise upon my stem—
The Flower, the whole Plant-being, produced by Light
With all Plant-systems and formations. . . . As in Fire
All elements dissolve, so in one bright
Ineffable essence all Plant-being dissolves to make the Flower.
My stem rises bright—
Organic water polarized to the dark
Earth-center, and to Light. [CP, 373]
Oken had frequently discussed even animals as moveable stems and blossoms, defining animals as "self-moveable or automatic blossoms," and noting that "A blossom, which, when separated from the stem, maintains by its own motion the galvanic process or the life within itself, and gets its process of polarization, not from a body lying external to or coherent with it (as is the vegetable stem); but only from itself—such blossom is an Animal." 34 In "Canticle," Sitwell reworks a traditional symbol for Jesus—the rose upon the cross—into a vision of the divine as embodied in the nexus of the organic and inorganic systems, suggesting that the chemistry of elements, the physics of light, and the organic life of the plant are inextricably intertwined.
Sitwell's poems of this period often explore the simple systems of sun, plant, and soil, yet revel in the development of more complicated animal systems (especially the human) that share an essential unity with those other realms. Oken's thinking gave a richly phrased and evocative account of these relationships. Even words, humans' greatest accomplishment, are organic systems according to Oken. In a passage Sitwell marked, he wrote, "Words, which are connected together according to organic laws, form an organic system, are at once alive, and have a meaning" (EP, 473). Sitwell marked the following passages as well:
1783. In so far as the animal vesicle is a whole solar system, to it, the characters that transcend the plant, such as motion, belong.
1784. But motion is not that alone which is displayed in the floral cyst when it has become solar; but with it there is yet something higher bestowed.
1785. Like light or sun the vesicle has the principle of its polarization or determination in itself; and it is certainly itself which moves its organs in conformity with this self-determination; but it is withal in antagonism towards the elements, like the sun is towards the planets. Through this antagonism the sun is destined unto the development of light. Although the light is its own product, still it perceives the object toward which the aether-polarity is directed. This perception of the direction, whither motion should act by means of the central polarity, is in the animal called Sensation.
1786. Sensation is the relation of the Central to the Peripheric, of the sun to the planet; motion is the relation of the periphery to the centre, of the planet to the sun. The Animal emerges into being from the alternating play of the supremest antagonism in the heavenly bodies, the Vegetable form that of the terrestrial antagonisms.
1787. Emission of light is discharging or unloading of the sun achieved by the influence of the planets; sensation is unloading of the animal by objects, by the world, and by its own organs.
1788. Sensation is therefore a positing of want in the animal. Through sensation nothing comes into, but rather something passes out of us.
1789. The animal vesicle is a sentient or feeling blossom. [EP, 324-5]
Next to proposition 1785, Sitwell wrote in the margin, "Its self-determination was destined to develop." Passages like these fascinated her with their bold assertion of the unity of physics, the inorganic, the organic, and even the sentient: animals as solar systems, sensation as motion, radiation of light as a discharging of the sun like the sensations in animals.
As in "The Canticle of the Rose," "Shadow" holds up the unity of the organic and inorganic in the face of atomic holocaust. And as the natural history lesson of the first few pages of "Shadow" begins to wind down, the general "we" of the poem discovers not only Cain, Dives, and Christ, but also a connection between the splendors of inorganic earth and its living systems:
There were great emerald thunders in the air
In the violent Spring, the thunders of the sap and the blood in
the heart—
The Spiritual Light, the physical Revelation. [CP, 368]
In the context of Oken's book, "the Spiritual Light, the physical Revelation" suggests a broader Romantic science of physics, biology, and spirit, and not simply an orthodox "divine revelation," as the religious readings of the poem have suggested. And at this point the poem turns back even further in time: it looks to early modern science to explore the connectedness of spirit and humanity to a unified natural world. Sitwell turns to the seventeenth-century thinker, Bishop Burnet, and finally, but most prevalently, to the sixteenth-century alchemist, Paracelsus, in order to explore these connections.
Lyell, Haeckel, and Oken had given Sitwell imaginative ways of gaining a longer perspective on life on earth, and Haeckel and Oken, in particular, had emphasized a unity in that vision that helped redress the imbalance that the physics of Soddy, Rutherford, Oppenheim, Bohr, and others seemed to have created. But her sources in the first part of the poem had not offered her a theory of catastrophe on the planet that could set such an event in both scientific and religious contexts. Haeckel (who was virulently anti-Roman Catholic), Oken, and Lyell might have had personal beliefs, but they disavowed religious dogma as scientific explanation. Lyell, in fact, explicitly rejected notions of catastrophic change. Yet certainly the atomic bombs required an image of change wrought upon nature by an extreme, traumatic event. Not only did human bodies continue to die from radiation effects for years after the blast, becoming sterile and cancerous, but the impact upon the nonhuman—organic and inorganic alike—was also remarkable. In a passage that might even have suggested part of the poem's title, "Shadow," Hersey writes:
The scientists noticed that the flash of the bomb had discolored concrete to a light reddish tint, had scaled off the surface of granite, and had scorched certain other types of building material, and that consequently the bomb had, in some places, left prints of the shadows that had been cast by its light. . . . (A few vague human silhouettes were found, and these gave rise to stories that eventually included fancy and precise details . . .) [H, 95-6]
Shadows burned onto stone as horrific inorganic reminders of the recent presence of the organic—tokens of human life rendered permanent in the inorganic—was only one of the strange consequences of the bomb. In "The Canticle of the Rose," Sitwell asks of a victim, "Where is she now? / Dissolved and gone— / And only her red shadow stains the unremembering stone" (CP, 374). Hersey notes that scientists estimated the heat at ground zero to have been over six-thousand degrees centigrade, and noted phenomena like melted tiles, instantly carbonized telephone poles, fission fragments on buildings, and mica that had been fused onto granite gravestones (H, 107).
After the natural history stanzas, Sitwell turned to more explicit evocations of the cataclysmic destruction of the bomb:
The Sun descending and the Earth ascending
To take its place above . . . the Primal Matter
Was broken, the womb from which all life began,
Then to the murdered Sun a totem pole of dust arose in memory of Man. [CP, 369]
In her drafts for her essay on the making of "Shadow," she writes:
On the 10th of September 1945, my brother Osbert and I were in the train on the way to Brighton where we were to give a reading. He leant across to me and handed me The Times [sic], pointing to a paragraph in it . . . a description by an eye witness of the horror at Hiroshima . . .
From that moment, night and day, the poem began. But it was not written until April of the following year. [N, 307]
Sitwell cites the article in her notes to the poem: "Transcript of an actual report by an eye-witness of the bomb falling on Hiroshima.—The Times, September 10, 1945" (CP, 427). One might read the evocation of "a totem pole of dust" as horribly ironic—a symbol of life and procreation, caused by the mushroom cloud of the bomb, to be followed by sterility and miscarriage. But the strange effects of the catastrophe, and the need to find a vision of hope, turned Sitwell's thoughts in less ironic directions. Hersey had written that, only a few weeks after the explosion,
Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb. [H, 91]
One might recall Oken's tripartite understanding of plant life that Sitwell had carefully noted: "Root and stem are the water- and earth-plant, the leaf is the air-plant, the flower is the light- or rather fire-plant" in relationship to Hersey's explanation of the sudden profusion of plant life (EP, 229). If the false sun of the bomb had murdered the natural sun and destroyed everything above the surface, it had only destroyed part of the plant life, and nature is resilient.
Press accounts of the phenomena related to the nuclear explosion suggested a catastrophe with biblical resonances. Hersey's portrayal of the aftermath of the bomb included vortexes of fire, whirlwinds, thunder, and even mysterious rains:
Houses nearby were burning, and when huge drops of water the size of marbles began to fall, he half thought that they must be coming from the hoses of firemen ting the blazes. (They were actually drops of condensed moisture falling from the turbulent tower of dust, heat, and fission fragments that had already risen miles into the sky above Hiroshima). [H, 25]
In stanzas twenty-one through twenty-four, Sitwell provides an account of the cataclysm which owes much to Thomas Burnet, the private chaplain of King William III. 35 Between 1680 and 1691, Burnet published (originally in Latin and then in English translation) the four books of Telluris Theoria Sacra, or The Sacred Theory of the Earth. The first book explores the deluge, the second the paradise that preceded it, the third the future conflagration of the world, and the fourth the paradise to come.
Though many scientists (including Lyell), made Burnet out to be a medieval fundamentalist, he was a cutting edge scientist of his day. 36 He argued in his preface that
'Tis a dangerous thing to engage the authority of Scripture in disputes against the Natural World in opposition to Reason; lest Time, which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made Scripture to assert. . . . We are not to suppose that any truth concerning the Natural World can be an Enemy of Religion; for Truth cannot be an Enemy of Truth, God is not divided against himself; therefore we ought not upon that account to condemn or censure what we have not examined or cannot disprove; as those that are of this narrow Spirit we are speaking of, are very apt to do. 37
As Stephen Jay Gould puts it, "Burnet's basic position has been advanced by nearly every theistic scientist since the Newtonian revolution: God made it right the first time. He ordained the laws of nature to yield an appropriate history; he needn't intervene later to patch and fix an imperfect cosmos by miraculous alteration of his own laws" (TA, 29).
For Burnet, then, science is based upon reason and the observation of a world ruled by unchanging natural laws. Gould notes that "Burnet viewed the flood as central to his methodological program. The Sacred Theory, therefore, does not proceed chronologically, but moves from deluge to preceding paradise, for Burnet held that if he could find a rational explanation for this most cataclysmic and difficult event, his method would surely encompass all history" (TA, 31). So Burnet calculates the volume of the ocean and finds that rain itself could not account for a flood of the magnitude described in the Bible. Instead, he imagines a perfect earth with a smooth surface and no oceans, but with a layer of subterranean ocean under a thin mantle. The mountains and the oceans we see today are a result of ruin and disorder, as the mantle collapses, dropping the land mass into water, causing the flood and the disarray of current topography (TE, 1:140-5). Burnet's book, like Oken's centuries later, explains the unity of all aspects of nature and humanity. His theory of creation and destruction accounts for plants and animals, the modes of human society, geographical and mineralogical features, and the influence of celestial objects. Even the seasons are seen as a post-Flood phenomena, as the earth's axis of rotation did not tilt until the catastrophe. In Burnet's case, unity results from a divine plan that is encoded into the natural laws that drive history.
But from the descriptions of the terrors of the rains and floods, Burnet turns to the even more horrifying descriptions of the conflagration, which he believes will be ignited by natural causes, such as volcanos and a long drought. Eventually even the soil melts and rock burns: "there is no terrestrial Body that does not finally yield to the force of fire, and may either be converted into flame, incorporated in fire, or into a liquor more ardent than either of them" (TE, 3:46). Moreover, "the whole exteriour region of the Earth, to the depth of the deepest part of the sea, will suffer in this fire; and suffer to that degree, as to be melted down, and the frame of it dissolved . . . there will be a sort of liquefaction and dissolution; It will become a molten sea mingled with fire" (TE, 3:53).
Sitwell's language and imagery in stanzas twenty-two and twenty-three of "Shadow" ("The violence of torrents, cataracts, maelstroms, rains / That went before the Flood," "the forked lightnings of the gold / From the split mountains," "Amid those terrible rains") seem based upon Burnet's depiction of the deluge (CP, 369). They are perhaps also based upon a passage from Burnet concerning the conflagration: "Lastly the Lightnings of the Air, and the flaming streams of the melting skies, will mingle and joyn with these burnings of the Earth" (TE, 3:84). His influence continues in stanza twenty-four:
The gulf that was torn across the world seemed as if the beds of all the Oceans
Were emptied. . . . . Naked, and gaping at what had once been the Sun,
Like the mouth of the Universal Famine,
It stretched its jaws from one end of the Earth to the other. [CP, 369]
Even more specifically, these lines suggest a passage in Burnet's third volume that seems appropriate to the nuclear fire at Hiroshima that melted even the sand beneath it. Burnet argues that the conflagration will entirely destroy the surface of the earth, not just scorch it:
Furthermore, the Renovation of the World, or The New Heavens and New Earth, which S. Peter, out of the prophets, tells us shall spring out of these that are burned and dissolved, do suppose this Earth reduc'd into a fluid Chaos, that it may lay a foundation for a second world. If you take such a skeleton of an Earth, as your scorching Fire would leave behind it; where the flesh is torn from the bones, and the Rocks and Mountains stand naked and staring upon you; the sea, half empty, gaping at the Sun, and the cities all in ruins and in rubbish; How would you raise a New World from this? [TE, 3:81]
Here, Sitwell chooses imagery from the wrong version—the scorched-earth version—of the conflagration, rather than the complete annihilation and liquefaction that Burnet predicts. Why?
Sitwell chooses the scorched-earth imagery because the nuclear conflagration is man made, not the judgment of God written into the natural laws and history of the planet. The nuclear fires will leave the imperfections of the world. The earth will recover from destruction caused by human degradation. It is this world that concerns Sitwell, and not a future paradise that Burnet predicts after the world cools and reforms. Though Burnet gives Sitwell a way of imagining an earth in the throes of catastrophe, she ultimately resists his vision of complete destruction. The scientific discourses that dominate the rest of the poem are those of healing and alchemy—of Paracelsus.
Sitwell possessed a copy of The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, called Paracelsus the Great translated by Arthur Edward Waite . Like her copy of Oken, she read it carefully, listing many passages in the front. 38 Her notebook drafts of the poem (and the drafts of her notes to the poem, which she also published) reveal that the writings of this Swiss alchemist, physician, astronomer, and general scientific theorist pervade the last half of "Shadow." Sitwell's search for a unifying science led her through Lyell, Haeckel, Oken, and Burnet, but it found its logical conclusion in the work of Paracelsus. Tropes of alchemy had been used to describe atomic physics in the early twentieth century, and Sitwell focused much of the second half of "Shadow" on recovering a different sense of alchemy: moving away from the simple transmutation of elements, she envisioned an alchemy that would reintegrate the sciences, creating organic and inorganic unity in twentieth-century physics. Paracelsus represented a kind of cosmological and scientific view that Sitwell advocated as a response to a nuclear holocaust caused by the dissociation of the sciences. As Webster explains:
As far as Paracelsus was concerned, man and the cosmos were analogues which were inseparably linked. The study of man the microcosm was unthinkable without an appreciation of his place in the physical and spiritual macrocosm. What Paracelsus termed 'astronomy' always found a central place in his accounts of his medical system. . . . Thus, although Paracelsus regarded his primary practical goal as the reform of medicine, his religious standpoint, repeated use of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, and recognition of the powerful effects of the celestial environment on man, constantly threw him back into the fields of cosmology and cosmogony. 39
Transmutation and alchemy in the atomic age had led to the bomb, and gold represented the nationalistic avarice and greed that caused world war and conflagration and was embodied by Dives. But Paracelsus's alchemy, which explored the interrelationships of life and physics and the healing power of gold over the physical decay of leprosy (again, a corollary to radiation sickness and cancer), could suggest an alternative vision of the sciences as healing and as drawing knowledge together into a benign unity.
Sitwell weaves Paracelsian thinking into the poem as she intentionally conflates the stories of the two different Lazaruses in the Bible—Lazarus, brother of Martha and Mary of Bethania, whom Jesus raises from the dead (John 11: 41-4), and Lazarus the beggar who is spurned by the rich man known as Dives in the Middle Ages (Luke 16: 19-31). After the stanzas invoking Burnet's description of the flood and the conflagration, Sitwell turns to the first Lazarus:
And in that hollow lay the body of our brother
Lazarus, upheaved from the world's tomb.
He lay in that great Death like the gold in the husk
Of the world . . . And round him, like spent lightnings, lay the Ore—
The balm for the world's sore.
And the gold lay in its husk of rough earth like the core
In the furred almond, the chestnut in its prickly
Bark, the walnut in a husk green and bitter.
Then to that hollow sea
The civilization of the Maimed, and, too, Life's lepers, came
As once to Christ near the Sea of Galilee. [CP, 369-70]
In John, Lazarus is resurrected by Jesus, but Sitwell also introduces the other Lazarus.  He begs for crumbs at the table of Dives, the rich man, but is spurned and is left to the dogs at the gate. When both men die, Lazarus is taken to a heavenly banquet, while Dives from the grave wishes Lazarus could bring him even a drop of water. Though willing, Lazarus is not allowed to offer relief. However, Sitwell's specific imagery of Lazarus lying "like gold in the husk / Of the world . . . And round him, like spent lightnings, lay the Ore— / The balm for the world's sore" is not from the Bible, but rather from the connection she makes over the next several stanzas to Paracelsus's writings, and, in particular, his discussions of gold as a cure for leprosy. The plant imagery (almonds, chestnuts, and walnuts) in stanza twenty-six is also from Paracelsus.
Sitwell was clearly fascinated by the parallel between the leprosy that Paracelsus sought to cure and the radiation sickness—and, more metaphorically, the moral sickness—associated with the atomic bomb. The parallel she develops between these illnesses becomes part of her poetic argument about the sciences. In the second volume of Hermetic Medicine and Hermetic Philosophy, in The Archidoxies, Paracelsus defines what he means by the word "quintessence":
The quintessence, then, is a certain matter extracted from all things which Nature has produced, and from everything which has life corporeally in itself, a matter most subtly purged of all impurities and mortality, and separated from all the elements. From this it is evident that the quintessence is, so to say, a nature, a force, a virtue, and a medicine, once, indeed shut up within things, but now free from any domicile and from all outward incorporation. [HA, 2:22]
He argues that "The quintessence of gold corresponds with fire" and, indeed, with the Sun (HA, 2:23). In passages to which Sitwell refers in her published notes in the Collected Poems, Paracelsus believed that the quintessence of gold, not just gold itself, could cure a leprous body. Her note to verse twenty-nine appears as: "'Also we must say that this or that is a disease of Gold, and not that it is leprosy.'—Paracelsus, Appendix I, Chapter VI." 40 The note to verses thirty-one through thirty-four includes: "'Gold is the most noble of all, the most precious and primary metal. . . . And we are not prepared to deny that leprosy, in all its forms, can be thereby removed from the human frame.'—Paracelsus. These verses also contain references to Hermetic Writings" (CP, 428).
Sitwell was attracted to the notion of quintessence of gold curing leprosy because it could serve as a commentary on atomic theory. According to the theory that developed the bomb, elements do each have something more "elemental" than their humanly tangible form. Uranium, like gold in Paracelsus's writings, can be touched and apprehended by human beings, but through a kind of alchemy, its inner "being" can release great energy. However, this energy is used entirely for destruction, and it is motivated by greed, symbolized by the very gold that heals leprosy (and heals the composite Lazarus in Sitwell's poem). Of course, Sitwell is not suggesting that Paracelsus understood atomic physics and sought nuclear fission. Rather, she saw Paracelsus's version of "atomic fission" as setting a proper course for science. The pure hidden forces of the elements of the universe, in the hands of the right scientist, are a source for the healing of bodies, not a cause of their illness. Illness becomes a kind of metaphor for twentieth-century nuclear physics.
Moreover, Paracelsus's understanding of the hidden properties of elements was tied into a much larger sense of the relationship between organic and inorganic (which lived on, to some extent, in the search for unities in Burnet, Oken, and Haeckel). The pamphlet version of "Shadow" included, beyond the two notes quoted above, several notes that were not reprinted in the Collected Poems:
Page 14, last verse. "Some of the visible trees produce their fruits covered up, for instance, chestnuts under a prickly bark, walnuts under one that is green and bitter, and under this again a bitter membrane, and then at last the kernel. So it happens in minerals, the kernels of which, that is to say, the metals are separated just like those others by barks."
Paracelsus, Hermetic and Alchemical Writings, translated by A. E. Waite. 41
Page 16, third part & following verses. "The third part of the primal matter of Gold, or of the tree from which Gold ought to grow, as a rose from a rose-seed, is salt, crystallized to the highest degree. . . and advanced to the highest transparency of the beryl."
Paracelsus, A Book About Minerals. [from HA, 1:250]
Page 17, second verse. [includes the Paracelsus quote from the CP note on verses thirty-one through thirty-four, above, then adds:]
"The quintessence of the Sun" (he means gold) "takes away from the roots all the symptoms of leprosy and renovates the body as honey and wax are purged and purified of their honeycomb."
Paracelsus. [from HA, 2:27]
Parcelsus's similes in these passages—minerals and metals are like the kernels of nuts; gold "grows" like a tree or like a rose from a rose seed; gold restores the body like a honeycomb purged of its honey and wax—are verbally rich, but they are also much more than simply similes. The rative language reinforces a major argument that runs through Paracelsus's writings: the inorganic and organic world are intimately tied together.
Indeed, an early draft of stanzas twenty-five and twenty-six makes more explicit the connection between Lazarus, who "lay in that great Death like the gold in the husk," and the passage about the unlocking of life and hidden potentials, where the gold "in its husk of rough earth" is juxtaposed with the nutritive nuts in their green bitter husks (CP, 369). In the draft, which appears in an undated letter the poet sent to John Lehmann, Sitwell included both ideas in the same stanza:
And in that hollow lay the body of our brother
Lazarus, heaved from the world's tomb; and round him the gold
Lay in the husk, as the chestnut in the prickly
Bark, the walnut under one that is green and bitter 42
The same draft version makes stanza twenty-seven more explicitly Paracelsian. The published version tells that "Life's lepers, came / As once to Christ near the Sea of Galilee" (CP, 370). The draft in the letter reads: "The cripples, the maimed, the blind of life were brought— / Down to that Place of Gold / As once to Christ near the Sea of Galilee." 43
Likewise, the early draft of stanza thirty-three connects the organic and the inorganic. In this case, the organic is connected to the catastrophe of flood and nuclear conflagration and is made more explicitly Paracelsian with the inclusion of an image of a honeycomb:
He did not look at us:
He said "What was spilt still surges like the Flood.
But Gold shall be the Blood
of the World . . . Brute gold condensed to the primal essence
Has the texture, smell, warmth, colour of Blood. Will it shape
Again the Shadow of Man? At least it will take
From what roots of life are left the symptoms of the leper—
And make the body sharp as the honeycomb. . . ." [CP, 370]
This early draft and the many drafts in the notebooks (too numerous to quote here) tinkered with the phrasing, sometimes drawing more heavily on Paracelsus's writings on leprosy and the quintessence of gold, and healing plants and gems. At other times, Sitwell moved closer to the synthesis of those ideas with the final vision of the poem, which brings Dives and Cain into a composite picture of betrayal and greed. 44
Sitwell ended "Shadow" with a religious sense of the collective guilt
of a culture that murdered so many thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
noting that "those ashes that were men / Will rise again / To be our Fires
upon the Judgment Day!" (CP, 372). Yet the scientific discourse
of healing with alchemy and medicine took precedence in the phrase
with which she summarized the poem: "In this poem I show the sufferers
from the disease hoping to cure themselves by means of some universal
application of a medicine made [from] the diseases' quintessence, used
as a prophylactic" (N, 62). The poem powerfully suggests that a
response to the biological crisis that atomic science had precipitated
by creating the bomb could only be met by a concerted and healing
reintegration of the sciences into an ethical whole, a unity with roots
that Sitwell could trace from the Romantic science of Oken and Haeckel
back to the alchemy of Paracelsus.
Mark Morrisson is Associate Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Penn State University. He is the author of The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920 , and is currently working on a project tentatively titled The "Newer Alchemy" and the Ownership of Atomic Theory, 1890-1939.
1. See Milorad Mladjenovi, The Defining Years in Nuclear Physics, 1932-1960s (Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1998), 65-9; Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 29; and Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 80-112. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Estate of Edith Sitwell for permission to quote from her unpublished notebooks and letters, and to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, for permission to use the Edith Sitwell Collection.
2. Tom Wilkie, British Science and Politics since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 7.
3. Edith Sitwell read John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946, originally published in the New Yorker) and copied passages from Hersey and from bomb reportage in the Daily Mail,Daily Express,Scottish Sunday Express, and other newspapers. John Langdon Davies's article, "Atom Bombs: Some Dread New Facts" (Daily Mail, 2 September 1946), conjured nightmarish visions that Sitwell copied into her undated notebook 78 of "subhuman" Japanese babies born centuries in the future due to radiation damage. Davies also described a radioactive dust dropped from planes onto unsuspecting towns at night to create "hidden biological results" and expressed the fear that "200 aeroplanes each with an atomic bomb could sterilise or cause chromosome injury to the entire population of Britain." The section called "Three Poems of the Atomic Age" first appeared in Edith Sitwell, The Song of the Cold (New York: Vanguard, 1948).
4. Sitwell was on the road to a conversion to Roman Catholicism—she was received into the church in 1955—and had addressed religious issues fairly directly in her poetry from the 1940s, and even, in a less sustained way, as far back as Gold Coast Customs . Scholars have not engaged with Sitwell's later poetry to the extent that they have with, for example, Façade . The flurry of work on "Three Poems of the Atomic Age" that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s largely emerged from Catholic journals and book series by scholars explicating Sitwell's religious vision. See, for example: Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Edith Sitwell: A Critical Essay (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans: 1966), published as part of the "Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective" series; publications by Sister M. Jeremy and John Ower in Renascence, which was published "by the Catholic Renascence Society, Inc., to promote the study of values in literature"; and articles appearing in religion-oriented journals such as The Personalist and the American Benedictine Review. John Ower published three essays on Sitwell during the period, and claimed her as a Catholic thinker well before her conversion: "Edith Sitwell was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1955, but her poetry reflects Christian and specifically Catholic ideas well before that date." See John Ower, "Edith Sitwell and the Atomic Bomb," American Benedictine Review 27 : 428, n. 2; hereafter abbreviated as "ES." Even recent work still focuses primarily on the religious vision without exploring any of the scientific contexts of the poem. See, for example, Pamela Slateliggett, "The Vision of Edith Sitwell: Prophecy and Sensation in Her World War II Poetry," Language and Literature 22 : 93-102.
5. Ower offers the most thorough religious criticisms, and his careful exploration of the Biblical images and concepts from "Salvation History" provide us with a theologically sophisticated account of Sitwell's interpretation of the atomic holocaust. He suggests that Sitwell's "vision of Fall and Redemption" was based on a dynamic between "alienation" and "atonement," which he calls the "matrix of reconciliation" ("ES," 427). For instance, Ower reads the ice age imagery and the "great oscillations / Of temperature" in the poem as symbols of the disjunction between the mind and instincts and emotions, which he suggests Sitwell sees as an aspect of the Fall ("ES," 428, n. 3). He reads the passages about intense cold as symbolizing the "loveless isolation" of the mind and an ironic parody of divine creation ex nihilo, without exploring their sources in scientific tracts that Sitwell cites in her published notes to the poem. Two of the most important of these are Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), hereafter abbreviated as PG; and Lorenz Oken's Elements of Physiophilosophy, trans. Alfred Tulk (London: Ray Society, 1847), hereafter abbreviated as EP.
6. Evelyn Fox Keller, Rering Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 48; hereafter abbreviated as RL.
7. Quoted in RL, 50-1.
8. See Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 36-8, 161-71.
9. Taken Care Of: The Autobiography of Edith Sitwell (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 168-9.
10. Sitwell possessed two of Einstein's texts in translation: Investigations on the Theory of the Brownian Movement, ed. R. Furt, trans. A. D. Cowper (London: Methuen, 1926) and Relativity: the Special and the General Theory: a Popular Exposition, trans. Robert W. Lawson (London: Methuen, 1920). While writing the atomic bomb poems she was taking some notes on Cambridge astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington's popular text, The Nature of the Physical World , and a few years later she made a note on the back of one of her notebooks to buy Eddington's Fundamental Theory .
11. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); hereafter abbreviated as DC. Also see Alex Keller, The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in His Cradle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), chapter 6. In my work-in-progress, The "Newer Alchemy" and the Ownership of Atomic Theory: The Cultural Work of Alchemy in Atomic Physics, Hermeticism, and Literature, 1890-1939, I contend that alchemy was the dominant metaphor for atomic physics and chemistry during this period.
12. See Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (New York: Routledge, 1992) for a psychoanalytic reading of the procreative metaphors that helped enable the construction of atomic weapons at Los Alamos.
13. As Keller notes, "Kelvin, who had long been in some tension with Darwin over the latter's abandonment of intelligent and benevolent design, ultimately concluded that Life would have to be altogether exempt from the laws of physics" (RL, 58).
14. The Collected Poems of Edith Sitwell (New York: Vanguard, 1954), 366; hereafter abbreviated as CP.
15. Sitwell's word choice also recalls press accounts of the paradoxical chill of radiation burn victims. In one poignant passage from Hersey's Hiroshima a priest helps a woman with "huge, raw flash burns on her body": "She began to shiver heavily, and again said it was cold. Father Kleinsorge borrowed a blanket from someone nearby and wrapped her up, but she shook more and more, and said again, 'I am so cold,' and then she suddenly stopped shivering and was dead." John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Knopf, 1946), 60; hereafter abbreviated as H.
16. Responding to Lyell's discoveries, Tennyson wrote:
"So careful of the type?" but no.
From scarpèd cliff and quarried stone
She cries, "A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go . . ."
Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 398.
17. Edith Sitwell, unpublished notebooks, no. 307, 310. Edith Sitwell Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. These notebooks, which Sitwell used in preparing poems and prose works, are unpaginated. They are referred to by notebook number and are hereafter abbreviated as N.
18. PG, 1:99. Sitwell may also have been inspired to include the lines about the Antarctic by Lyell's discussion of the much higher portion of ice-covered land in the southern hemisphere.
19. See Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900); hereafter abbreviated as RU. I am working from the first English edition of McCabe's translation. Sitwell's copy of the book was a later edition of the same translation, published in London by Watts & Co., 1929. Hers was the fourth impression, dated April 1937.
20. Haeckel praises Lamarck for moving science beyond the theory of fixed species, but especially applauds Darwin for discovering the essential element that Lamarck had missed, a theory of the mechanism of species change through natural selection.
21. This draft is the least developed. In it, Sitwell makes a mistake, confusing Pithecanthropus alalus, which Haeckel describes as "the ape-man without speech," with Pithecanthropus erectus, the "missing link" (RU, 84).
22. This draft appears as follows:
During the era of the Eocene
Tertiary formations, where the Pampean
mud was formed, where the Megatherium
Mylodon
Lie buried. . . . after the Deluge
the slow upheaval and subsidence of each race
During the Pliocene Period, arose the Ape-Man,
That has no speech, Pithecanthropus Alalus,
There were great oscillations of temperature
During that epoch of the cold . . .
The bones changed to sapphire
and saw the pine leaf
The tooth of the mammoth changed
to turquoise.
________
We would have liked to have stretched out a hand to each other. . . . but had forgotten___
Little people running to and fro, an anarchy[?]
___
But the great Spring turned to dust, as to a lover
The nature of Death sank-
Sank with the saps of tree world in our great Spring [N, 61]
23. This passage appears on pages 176-7 of Sitwell's edition of RU; see note 19.
24. Pierce C. Mullen, "The Romantic as Scientist: Lorenz Oken," Studies in Romanticism 16, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 391-6; hereafter abbreviated as "RS."
25. Kenneth L. Caneva, "Physics and Naturphilosophie: A Reconnaissance," History of Science 35, no. 1 : 38. Also see "RS."
26. His mature works began with Compendium of Nature Philosophy , The Theory of the Senses and a System of Animal Classification Based upon the Senses , Generation , First Ideas on a Theory of Light, Darkness, Colors and Heat , and Compendium of the System of Nature Philosophy (1809-11)—which, as Mullen notes, "sought to construct a whole world from deductive premises" ("RS," 387).
27. There were certainly more recent challenges than Naturphilosophie to mechanistic philosophies in the modernist period. For instance, it is hard to imagine that Sitwell was unaware of the work of Henri Bergson and the vitalist philosophy that was at its height from the late nineteenth century through roughly the 1920s. See Sanford Schwartz, "Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism," in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 277-305. I don't find direct evidence that Bergsonianism played a role in Sitwell's thinking in the 1940s. Instead, it appears that Oken's attack on mechanistic sciences and his highly idiosyncratic and imaginative attempt to weave together a system that would unify biology, physics, geology, and virtually all other sciences, captured Sitwell's fancy in a way that Bergson may not have. Sitwell owned a copy of Bergson's Creative Evolution , but her 1959 reprint was published well after the composition of the bomb poems.
28. See "RS," 388-9 for a succinct summary of Oken's voluminous work and his coining of the term "biology."
29. On the front leaf Sitwell noted 110 different pages, sometimes with annotations, and she marked in the margins, sometimes with annotations, 188 separate propositions (the book was published in the form of numbered propositions). However, two pairs of pages, 585-6 and 587-8, were never cut, so she must not have read every page (these pages contain descriptions of various categories of worms).
30. Oken begins by making a number of claims about the mathematical nature of the universe:
2. The universe or world is the reality of mathematical ideas, or, in simpler language, of mathematics.
3. Philosophy is the recognition of mathematical ideas as constituting the world, or the repetition of the origin of the world in consciousness.
4., 5. Spirit is the motion of mathematical ideas. Nature, their manifestation.
6. The philosophy of Spirit is the representation of the movements of ideas in consciousness. [EP, 1]
31. Oken claims that "The law of causality is a law of polarity. Causality is valid only in time, is only a series of numbers" (EP, 21).
32. Sitwell's lines, "Then Time froze / To immobility and changed to Space," while conjuring a sense of the response to the tragic news of Hiroshima—time froze—probably owes more to Oken than to popular readings of Einstein's connectedness of space and time.
33. Oken asserted that "Animals are entire heavenly bodies, satellites or moons, which circulate independently about the earth; all plants, on the contrary, taken together are only equivalent to one heavenly body. An animal is an infinity of plants" (EP, 207).
34. EP, 322. Regarding polarization in plants, Oken notes: "The plant may be characterized as organic water which is polarized upon two sides, towards the earth and the air. The vegetable vesicle must therefore maintain two poles" (EP, 206).
35. In the first edition of "Shadow" (a 1947 pamphlet), Sitwell attributes the first two lines of stanza twenty-five—"The gulf that was torn across the world seemed as if the beds of all the Oceans / Were emptied . . . Naked, and gaping at what once had been the Sun, / Lies the mouth of the Universal Famine / It stretched its jaws from one end of the Earth to the other"—to Bishop Burnet's Theory of the Earth. In the later Collected Poems version of these notes, she omits this attribution, instead citing Theory of the Earth only for the first, second, and fourth lines of the twenty-third stanza: "And with them, the forked lightnings of the gold / From the split mountains, / Blasting their rivals, the young foolish wheat-ears / Amid those terrible rains" (CP, 369).
36. Stephen Jay Gould has written one of the most probing reassessments of Burnet in recent years, arguing against a vision of history that only considers the "progress" of science: "the rationale for such a simplistic one-way flow from observation to theory has become entirely bankrupt. . . . Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind permits—from metaphor and analogy to all the flights of fruitful imagination that C. S. Pierce calls 'abduction.'" Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 6-7; hereafter abbreviated as TA. Gould explains that, in this theory of history, "Thomas Burnet, villain by taint of theological dogmatism, wrote his Sacred Theory of the Earth in the 1680s. The first hero, James Hutton, worked exactly a century later, writing his initial version of the Theory of the Earth in the 1780s. Charles Lyell, second hero and codifier of modernity, then wrote his seminal treatise, Principles of Geology, just fifty years later, in the 1830s" (TA, 4). He points out that, by the early nineteenth century, geologists like Lyell had come to ridicule Burnet's scientific methods for their fancifulness, religious dogma, and lack of compelling scientific evidence, yet Lyell's sense of "scientific history" is the very kind against which Gould argues. Of Burnet's Sacred Theory, Lyell wrote:
Even Milton had scarcely ventured in his poem to indulge his imagination so freely in painting scenes of the Creation and Deluge, Paradise and Chaos, as this writer, who set forth pretensions to profound philosophy. He explained why the primeval earth enjoyed a perpetual spring before the flood! Shewed how the crust of the globe was fissured by "the sun's rays," so that it burst, and thus the diluvial waters were let loose from a supposed central abyss. Not satisfied with these themes, he derived from the books of the inspired writers, and even from heathen authorities, prophetic views of the future revolutions of the globe, gave a most terrific description of the general conflagration, and proved that a new heaven and a new earth will rise out of a second chaos—after which will follow the blessed millennium. [PG, 1: 37-8; italics in original]
So why would Sitwell include both Burnet and Lyell as building blocks for the same poem? I would argue that her vision of the history of scientific "progress" is more like Gould's than Lyell's. And, beyond even Gould's understanding of the embeddedness of science in the cultural texture of its day, Sitwell seems to have seen that the imaginative resources of the past can be brought to bear upon the present to help revise scientific emphasis.
37. Thomas Burnet, The Theory of the Earth: Containing an Account of the Original of the Earth, and of All the General Changes Which It Hath Already Undergone, or Is to Undergo, Till the Consummation of All Things (London: R. Norton for W. Kettilby, 1684-90), 1: preface 3; hereafter abbreviated as TE.
38. Historians have recently redeemed Paracelsus from his reputation as the last gasp of the Dark Ages and magic before true science began with Newton and others. Andrew Weeks has explored Paracelsus's role in the Protestant Reformation in Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). Charles Webster has shown that "the first major confrontation of the Scientific Revolution was between Paracelsus and Galen, rather than between Copernicus and Ptolemy." Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3-4. Paracelsus can be seen as a father of modern pharmacology, and Webster argues that even the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century did not make Paracelsian thought obsolete. Webster detects Paracelsus's influence on the Atomism of Pierre Gassendi, the work of Francis Bacon, the chemistry of Robert Boyle, and chemical therapy in the later seventeenth century. He argues that the English physiology of Francis Glisson, John Mayow, and Thomas Willis were all influenced by Paracelsus. Webster also notes that Newton had a lively interest in magic and alchemy, possessing volumes by Paracelsus in his enormous collection of alchemical works.
39. Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton, 4. Arthur Edward Waite, the translator of the version of Paracelsus's writings that Sitwell used, stridently emphasized the interconnectedness of all aspects of science and religion in Paracelsus that Sitwell desired. In his preface, he argued that:
With Paracelsus the province of alchemy was not limited to the transmutation of metals. It was, broadly speaking, the development of hidden possibilities or virtues in any substance, whether by God, or man, or Nature. Thus it included the philosophy of creation, and dealt with the first matter as developed into the universe by Divine Power. It included as the natural evolution which takes place round us, whether in the formation of metals within the earth, or the formation of animals in the matrix. Finally, it included the development by man's skill and art of whatsoever was capable of improvement in the products of Nature.
The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, called Paracelsus the Great, trans. Arthur Edward Waite (London: James Elliot, 1894), 1:xiv-xv; hereafter abbreviated as HA.
40. CP, 428. The complete passage from Paracelsus reads: "I would persuade every one to be more accurately acquainted with the trees, for he who knows not their seed is involved in fundamental errors. Also we must say that this or that is a disease of gold, and not that it is leprosy" (HA, 2:320).
41. This passage, which Sitwell copied out in notebook 62, is further explained by the following passage in Paracelsus:
There are some trees which bear their fruit, not nakedly, but under mixed conditions. The chestnut, the nut, and other similar growths, have a bark, thorny in appearance, and inside another, while, lastly a thin skin encloses the kernel. So, in like manner, there are metals, also, and minerals lying hid in flesh and skin, such as are the ore of iron, the ore of silver, and so on. These have to be removed in order that, after separation, the desired fruit may be extracted. [HA, 1:242]
42. Edith Sitwell to John Lehmann, undated letter, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
43. Ibid.
44. Stanza thirty-seven in the Collected Poems includes: "But near him a gold sound— / The voice of an unborn wheat-ear accusing Dives— / Said, 'Soon I shall be more rare, more precious than gold" (CP, 371). The draft version of these lines that appears in the letter to Lehmann drew the use of wheat as a life-giving commodity (subject to greed, but more necessary than gold) into the dialogue with Paracelsus on leprosy: "But the unborn wheat-ear said 'When the quintessence / Shall be extracted from the amber or from musk / There is left only the husk- / A body that stinks and is dry as what was once the gold swoln wheat-ear.'" In the published poem, Sitwell includes part of this last line in stanza thirty-two, after describing Dives who is now, in a turning of the tables, suffering from leprosy of the heart. In stanza thirty-one, she writes: "Like a great ear of wheat that is swoln with grain, / Then ruined by white rain, / He lay. . . . His hollow face, dust white, was cowled with a hood of gold" (CP, 370).


{% with key='Rename-column-filter' %}{% include "includes/help.html" %}{% endwith %} Rename and retag an existing column.


Development
These are development notes taken during the development of the Treadmill.
mkDocs
This documentation is written in markdown and a static site is generated with mkDocs using the Cinder theme. Previously I have used Jekyll which is amazing. Going with mkDocs to see if a simple site is acceptable.
When writing markdown, serve a mkDocs site locally with
cd docs/
mkdocs serve --dev-addr=<IP_ADDRESS>:8000 # serves built site on LAN IP
mkdocs serve # serves built site on localhost at <IP_ADDRESS>:8000
mkdocs build #generates the site into docs/site/
Deploy to Github gh-pages
Deploy to github gh-pages by follow mkDocs deployment instructions.
mkdocs gh-deploy
will use the gh-pages branch of repository specified in mkdocs.yml
# this will deploy to github gh-pages specified in mkdocs.yml
cd docs #should have mkdocs.yml file
mkdocs build --clean
mkdocs gh-deploy --clean
#site is then available at
http://cudmore.github.io/treadmill
I am doing this on OSX. Not doing this on Debian because I do not have git/github properly configured.
Tweak Cinder
Along the way I have actually contributed to Cinder, the mkDocs template that makes this site. See here.
Use 'pip show mkdocs' to figure out where your cinder files are
pip show mkdocs
/home/cudmore/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages
Generate a single PDF from mkDocs site
Use mkdocs-pandoc to convert the mkdocs site into a single pdf. This creates a table of contents and appends all .md files using pandoc as a backend.
cd docs
mkdocs2pandoc > mydocs.pd
pandoc --toc -f markdown+grid_tables+table_captions -o mydocs.pdf mydocs.pd # Generate PDF
pandoc --toc -f markdown+grid_tables -t epub -o mydocs.epub mydocs.pd # Generate EPUB
I found it easy to do this on OSX using the pandoc installer. I did not get this working on Debian.
Platformio
If you prefer you can use [Platformio][5] to do everything from a command line. This has the distinct advantage that you can compile and upload code from a headless computer including a Raspberry Pi or any system running Linux.
Platformio is a python library so you should be good to go with pip install platformio
.
Have a look [here][6] to create a platformio.ini file for your specific Arduino. Here are three different board configurations
platformio init --board uno # arduino uno
platformio init --board pro16MHzatmega328 # generic arduino pro
platformio init --board nodemcuv2 # arduino node mcu
After 'platformio init', platformio.ini will have environment configurations. You only want to have one of these blocks at a time to simplify compilation. For example [env:uno].
[env:uno]
platform = atmelavr
framework = arduino
board = uno
build_flags = -D _expose_interrupts_ #creates compiler directive
#[env:pro16MHzatmega328]
#platform = atmelavr
#framework = arduino
#board = pro16MHzatmega328
#[env:nodemcuv2]
#platform = espressif
#framework = arduino
#board = nodemcuv2
#upload_port = /dev/ttyUSB0
Compile, upload, and clean Arduino code with
platformio run #compile arduino code
platformio run --target upload #compile and upload
platformio run --target clean #clean project
Finally, once the code is running you can open a serial port connection with
platformio serialports monitor -p /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 115200 #a serial port monitor
Specifying the correct serial port for the Arduino is critical. Specify this in the treadmill.py file.
#serialStr = '/dev/tty.usbmodem618661' #teensy at work
#serialStr = '/dev/tty.usbmodem618661' #teensy?
#serialStr = '/dev/ttyUSB0' #hand soldered arduino micro (home debian)
#serialStr = '/dev/tty.usbserial-A50285BI' # hand soldered at work
serialStr = '/dev/ttyACM0' #uno
5V Relay
A relay allows a 3.5 or 5 V DIO pin to turn a higher voltage switch on and off. For example, you use a 5V relay to turn a 12V line on and off.
How to wire a 5V relay is here
http://www.codeguru.com/IoT/understanding-relays-in-iot-development.html


In type 1 diabetes your pancreas no longer makes insulin, so you have to inject it to control your blood glucose levels.
There are different types of insulin, taken at different times.
Insulin taken once or twice a day
This is called long-acting, background or basal insulin.
It gives your body the insulin it needs whether you eat or not.
Basal insulin should keep your blood glucose stable overnight and between meals.
Insulin taken with food or drink
This is called fast-acting, mealtime or bolus insulin.
It helps reduce the rise in blood glucose caused by eating or drinking.
You usually take it before a meal, snack or drink with carbohydrates in it.
Diabetes UK has more information on treating diabetes with insulin.
Page last reviewed: 14 May 2018
Next review due: 14 May 2021


Vince Staples links up with 6LACK and Mereba on new song ‘Yo Love’
It's taken from the soundtrack to new film 'Queen & Slim'
Vince Staples has shared a new song featuring 6LACK and Medeba – listen to ‘Yo Love’ below.
The track is taken from the soundtrack to new heist film Queen & Slim.
- Read more: Vince Staples – ‘FM!’ review
The new film, directed by Melina Matsoukas, comes out on November, with the soundtrack dropping in advance on November 15. Listen to the new track below.
‘Yo Love’ follows a recent pair of tracks from Staples shared alongside his new web TV show. The Vince Staples Show’ debuted back in August, and its first episode also saw the rapper share a new song called ‘So What?’.
At the start of the month, the second episode of the series dropped and was duly joined by a new track too – both the episode and song are named ‘Sheet Music’.
The tracks are the California rapper’s first releases since his 2018 album, ‘FM!’
In a four-star NME review of ‘FM!’, Dhruva Balram called the album “a compelling reminder that life isn’t always sunny.”
The review continues: “One of hip-hop’s most iconic characters, Staples has set himself apart from his peers numerous times before.
“Each idea is significantly different from the last and this latest album is an immersive look at the grizzly realities of millions, a notion he re-iterates on the album’s final lines: “Tryna get rich, get everybody fed / But everybody dead”.”


ODSCurrentDomain
ods-widgets
A service containing the current domain informations. Available informations are described in the ODSCurrentDomainProvider documentation.


Source code for gods
from abc import ABC, abstractmethod #Library that forces abstraction, similar to abstract classes in java
[docs]class Gods(ABC):
"""
This is the main god class from which all other classes derive
"""
version = '0.1'
@abstractmethod
def __init__(self, name, type, hitpoints, initialworshipers):
"""
creates the variables associated with the class
:type name: string
:param name: the name of the god
:type type: string
:param type: the area the god is from i.e. greek
:type hitpoints: string
:param hitpoints: the amount of hitpoints the god starts with
:type initialworshipers: string
:param initialworshipers: the initial amount of worshipers the god has
"""
self.name = name
self.type = type
self.hitpoints = hitpoints
self.worshipers = initialworshipers
self.followerrate = 1
self.determinerank(self.worshipers)
[docs] @abstractmethod
def determinerank(self, worshipers):
"""
:type worshipers: string
:param worshipers: the amount of worshipers a god currently has
Method that changes the rank of the god based on worshipers;
overridden in 'type' class | Is an abstact Method
"""
pass
[docs] @abstractmethod
def typebonus(self):
"""Method that will be overridden based on which type of god the class is;
adds a bonus to an attribute based on type and rank | Is an abstact Method"""
pass
def __str__(self):
"""Child classes will now print with all important info"""
namestring = ("Name: {}".format(self.name))
typestring = ("God Type: {}".format(self.type))
hpstring = ("Hitpoints: {}".format(self.hitpoints))
rankstring = ("Rank: {}".format(self.rank))
worshipersstring = ("Worshipers: {}".format(self.worshipers))
followerratestring = ("Follower Rate: {}".format(self.followerrate))
return "{} \n{} \n{} \n{} \n{}".format(namestring, typestring, hpstring, rankstring, worshipersstring, followerratestring)


func CalculateSummary(audits *[]global.Audit) (summary global.Summary)
CalculateSummary counts how many audits were successful, failed or errored. Also calculates the how many audits passed in percentage.
func CopyFile(source, destination string) error
CopyFile copies a file from a source to a destination and returns an error if there was an error, otherwise nil
func Delete(path string)
Delete removes all files and folders in the specified path
func WriteResultReport(report *global.ReportStruct)
WriteResultReport Writes all the results in a resultReport.json File.
func Zip(destination string, source string) error
Zip Creates a zipped copy of the the source and saves it in destination.


--- layout: page title: About header-img: "img/about-bg.png" ---
She/Her Becoming the change I want to see in the world


Rails!
Since we will be doing so much work with Rails over the course of DBC I decided that this would be a great topic to learn more about. Rails is NOT the same as Ruby in that it is the open sourced web application framework that runs using the Ruby development language. Rails strives to be a very efficient and more simple framework by reducing the need for repetitive code and using convention rather than configuration.
Technical Stuff
Ruby uses the Model-View-Controller framework. Luckily I have some experience with the Zend Framework, which is also MVC so I know a little bit about what each of these pieces does. The model interacts with database tables. The controller is made up of actions and handles the external requests and interactions with the models and views. The controller gives information to the view to be displayed and is basically what you see so it is usually made up of HTML.
Structure
my_app_directory/
/app
/controller
/helpers
/models
/views
/layouts
/components
/config
/db
/doc
/lib
/log
/public
/script
/test
/tmp
/vendor
README
Rakefile