Possession (34 page)

The grassy knoll

Shivers in His embrace

His muscles—roll

About—about—His Face

Smiles hot and gold

Over the small hill’s brow

And every fold

Contracts and stiffens—now

He gathers strength

His glistering length

Grips, grips: the stones

Cry out like bones

Constricted—earth—in pain

Cries out—again—

He grips and smiles—

Bend nearer, Brother, if you please. I fear

I trouble you. It will not be for long.

I thank you now, before my voice, or eyes,

Or weak wit fail, that you have sat with me

Here in this bare white cell, with the domed roof

As chalky-plain as any egg’s inside.

I shall be hatched tonight. Into what clear

And empty space of quiet, she best knows,

The holy anchoress of Germany

Who charged you with my care, and speaks to God

For my poor soul, my small soul, briefly housed

In this shrunk shelly membrane that He sees,

Who holds, like any smiling Boy, this shell

In his bright palm, and with His instrument

Of Grace, pricks in his path, for infinite Light

To enter through his pinhole, and seek out

What must be sucked to him, an inchoate slop

Or embryonic Angel’s fledgling wings.

I have not much to leave. Once I had much,

Or thought it much, but men thought otherwise.

Well-nigh three thousand winged or creeping things

Lively in death, injected by my Art,

Lovingly entered, opened and displayed—

The types of Nature’s Bible, ranged in ranks

To show the secrets of her cunning hand.

No matter now. Write—if you please—I leave

My manuscripts and pens to my sole friend,

The Frenchman, the incomparable Thévenot,

Who values, like a true philosopher

The findings of a once courageous mind.

He should have had my microscopes and screws—

The copper helper with his rigid arms

We called Homunculus, who gripped the lens

Steadier than human hands, and offered up

Fragments of gauze, or drops of ichor, to

The piercing eyes of Men, who dared to probe

Secrets beyond their frame’s unaided scope.

But these are gone, to buy the bread and milk

This curdled stomach can no more ingest.

I must die in his debt. He is my friend

And will forgive me. Write that hope. Then write

For her, for Antoinette de Bourignon

(Who spoke to me, when I despaired, of God’s

Timeless and spaceless point of Infinite Love)

That, trusting her and Him, I turn my face

To the bare wall, and leave this world of things

For the No-thing she shewed me, when I came

Halting to Germany, to seek her out.

Now sign it, Swammerdam, and write the date,

March, 1680, and then write my age

His forty-third year. His small time’s end. His
time—

Who saw Infinity through countless cracks

In the blank skin of things, and died of it.

Think you, a man’s life grows a certain shape

As out of ant’s egg antworm must proceed

And out of antworm wrapped in bands must come

The monstrous female or the winged drone

Or hurrying worker, each in its degree?

I am a small man, closed in a small space,

Expert in smallness, in the smallest things,

The inconsiderable and overlooked,

The curious and the ephemeral.

I like your small cell, Brother. Poverty,

Whiteness, a window, water, and your hand

Steadying the beaker at my cracking lips.

Thank you. It is enough.

                                      Where I was born

Was a small space too, not like this, not bare,

A brilliant dusty hutch of mysteries,

A cabinet of curiosities.

What did my eyes first light on? There was scarce

Space for a crib between the treasure-chests,

The subtle-stoppered jars and hanging silks,

Feathers and bones and stones and empty gourds

Heaped pêle-mêle o’er the tables and the chairs.

A tray of moonstones spilled into a bowl

Of squat stone scarabs and small painted eyes

Of alien godlings winked from dusty shelves.

A mermaid swam in a hermetic jar

With bony fingers scraping her glass walls

And stiff hair streaming from her shrunken head.

Her dry brown breasts were like mahogany,

Her nether parts, coiled and confined, were dull,

Like ancient varnish, but her teeth were white.

And there was too a cockatrice’s egg,

An ivory-coloured sphere, or almost sphere,

That balanced on a Roman drinking-cup

Jostling a mummy-cat, still wrapped around

With pitch-dark bandages from head to foot,

Sand-dried, but not unlike the swaddling-bands

My infant limbs were held in, I assume.

And your hands, will they? presently will fold

This husk here in its shroud and close my eyes,

Weakened by so much straining over motes

And specks of living matter, eyes that oped

In innocent lustre on that teasing heap

Of prizes reaped round the terrestrial globe

By resolute captains of the proud Dutch ships

That slip their anchors here in Amsterdam,

Sail out of mist and squalls, ride with the wind

To burning lands beneath a copper sun

Or never-melted mountains of green ice

Or hot dark secret places in the steam

Of equatorial forests, where the sun

Strikes far above the canopy, where men

And other creatures never see her light

Save as a casual winking lance that runs

A silver shaft between green dark and dark.

I had a project, as a tiny boy

To make a catalogue of all this pelf,

Range it, create an order, render it,

You might say, human-sized, by typing it

According to the use we made of it

Or meanings we saw in it. I would part

Medicine from myth, for instance, amulets

(Pure superstition) from the minerals—

Rose-quartz, quicksilver, we could grind to heal

Agues or tropic fever. Living things

Should have their own affined taxonomy,

Insect with insect, dusty bird with bird,

And all the eggs, from monstrous ostrich-globe

To chains of soft-shelled snakes’ eggs, catalogued,

Measured with calipers and well set out

Gainst taffeta curtains, in curved wooden cups.

My father had a pothecary’s shop

And seemed well-pleased at first to have a son

With such precocious yearnings of the mind.

He was ambitious for me. In his thoughts

He saw me doing human good, admired

By men, humble in God’s eyes, eloquent

For truth and justice. When he saw that I

Was not the lawyer-son his hopes embraced

He fixed on a physician. “Who can mend

Man’s ailing frame, succours his soul too,” said

My father, a devout and worldly man,

“And keeps himself in bread and meat and wine.

Since fallen man must ail, the doctor’s care

Is ever-wanted, this side of the grave.”

But I had other leanings. Did they come

From scrupulous intellect, or glamorous spell

Cast by my infant nursery’s denizens?

It seemed to me that true anatomy

Began not in the human heart and hands

But in the simpler tissues, primal forms,

Of tiny things that crept or coiled or flew.

The clue to life lay in the blind white worm

That eats away the complex flesh of men,

Is eaten by the farmyard bird who makes

A succulent dinner for another man

And so completes the circle. Life is One

I thought, and rational anatomy

Begins at the foot o’ the ladder, on the rung

Nearest the fertile heat of Mother Earth.

Was it for that, or was it that my Soul

Had been possessed, in that dark Cabinet

By the black spider, big as a man’s fist,

Tangible demon, in her sooty hair,

Or by the coal-black Moths of Barbary

Pierced through their frail dark wings, and crucified

With pins, for our amusement?

                                         These were strange

And yet were forms of life, as I was too

(With a soul superadded, understood)

And kin to me, or so I thought, when young.

For all seemed fashioned from the self-same stuff,

Mythic gold yolk and glassy albumen

Of ancient Egypt’s fabled Mundane Egg,

Laid in the Void by sable-plumaged Night.

From which sprang Eros, all in feathered light

Who fecundated Chaos, wherein formed

Germens of all that lives and moves on Earth.

The Orphic fables in their riddling wit

Pointed us there, perhaps, towards a truth.

I sought to know the origins of life.

I thought it lawful knowledge. Did not God

Who made my hands and eyes, lend me the skill

To make my patient copper mannikin

Who held the lenses, variously curved

Steady above the living particles

I learned to scry and then to magnify

Successively in an expanding scale

Of diminution or of magnitude,

Until I saw successive plans and links

Of dizzying order and complexity?

I could anatomise a mayfly’s eye,

Could so arrange the cornea of a gnat

That I could peer through that at New Church Tower,

And see it upside down and multiplied,

Like many pinpoints, where no Angels danced.

A moth’s wing scaly like a coat of mail,

The sharp hooked claws upon the legs of flies—

I saw a new world in this world of ours—

A world of miracle, a world of truth

Monstrous and swarming with unguessed-at life.

That glass of water you hold to my lips,

Had I my lenses, would reveal to us

Not limpid clarity as we suppose—

Pure water—but a seething, striving horde

Of animalcules lashing dragon-tails

Propelled by springs and coils and hairlike fronds

Like whales athwart the oceans of the globe.

The optic lens is like a slicing sword.

It multiplies the world, or it divides—

We see the many in the one, as here,

We see the segments of what once seemed smooth,

Rough pits and craters on a lady’s skin,

Or fur and scales along her gleaming hair.

The more the Many were revealed to me

The more I pressed my hunt to find the One—

Prima Materia, Nature’s shifting shape

Still constant in her metamorphoses.

I found her Law in the successive Forms

Of ant and butterfly, beetle and bee.

I first discerned the pattern of the growth

From egg to simple grub, from grub encased,

Shrinking in part, in other putting forth

New organs in its sleep, until it stir,

Split and disgorge the tattered silk, which fast

Trembles and stiffens and then takes the air

Unfurled in splendour, tawny, sapphire blue,

Eyed like the peacock, tiger-barred, or marked

Between its wings with dark death’s eyeless head.

Within the crystal circle of the lens

My horny thumbs were elephantine pads.

I fashioned me a surgeon’s armoury—

Skewers and swords, scalpels and teasing hooks—

Not out of steel, but softest ivory,

Sharpened and turned beyond our vision’s range,

Lances and lancets, that the naked eye

Could not discern, beneath the lens’s stare.

With these I probed the creatures’ very life

And source of life, of generation.

Their commonwealths are not as we supposed.

Lay out the ant-hill’s Lord, the beehive’s King

The centre of the patterns that they weave

Fetching and carrying, hurrying to feed,

Construct and guard their world, the pinnacle

Or apex of the social hierarchy—

Lay out this creature on the optic disk,

Lay bare the seat of generation

The organs where the new lives lie and grow,

Where the eggs take their form. She is no King

But a vast Mother, on whose monstrous flanks

Climb smaller sisters, hurrying to tend

Her progeny, to help with her travail,

Carry her nectar and give up their lives

If needs be, to save hers, for she is Queen,

The necessary Centre of the Brood.

It was these eyes first saw the Ovaries,

These hands that drew them, and this fading mind

Discerned the law of Metamorphosis

And wrote it down to show indifferent men.

I had no honour of it. Not at Home—

My father cast me bankrupt in the street—

Nor ’mongst my peers in Medicine. When, by Want

Driven to sell my library of slides,

My demonstrations and experiments,

I found no Buyer, nor no man of Science,

Philosopher or Doctor, who would take

My images of Truth, my elegant

Visions of life, and give them hope to last.

And so I came to penury and beg

For sops of bread and milk and scraps of meat

Scattered with maggots of the self-same flies

I marked the breeding of.

Great Galileo with his optic tube

A century ago, displaced this Earth

From apprehension’s Centre, and made out

The planets’ swimming circles and the Sun

And beyond that, motion of infinite space

Sphere upon sphere, in which our spinning world

Green grass and yellow desert, mountains white

And whelming depths of bluest sea, is but

A speck in a kind of star-broth, rightly seen.

They would have burned him for his saying so,

Save that the sage, in fear of God and strong

In hope of life, gainsaid his own surmise,

Submitted him to doctors of the Church

Who deal in other truths and mysteries.

It was one step, I say, to displace Man

From the just centre of the sum of things—

But quite another step to strike at God

Who made us as we are, so fearfully

And wonderfully made our intellects,

Our tireless quest to
know
, but also made