The Poetry of John Tyndall COMPARATIVE LITERATURE and CULTURE
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The Poetry of John Tyndall COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CULTURE Series Editors TIMOTHY MATHEWS AND FLORIAN MUSSGNUG Comparative Literature and Culture explores new creative and critical perspectives on literature, art and culture. Contributions offer a comparative, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary focus, showcasing exploratory research in literary and cultural theory and history, material and visual cultures, and reception studies. The series is also interested in language-based research, particularly the changing role of national and minority languages and cultures, and includes within its publications the annual proceedings of the ‘Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies’. Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, UCL. Florian Mussgnug is Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature, UCL. EthicsTheCanada Poetry and in the FrameAesthetics of ofJohnCopyright, Translation CollectionsTyndall and the Image of Canada, 1895– 1924 Exploring the Work of Atxaga, Kundera and Semprún HarrietPhilip J. Hatfield Hulme Edited by Roland Jackson, Nicola Jackson and Daniel Brown 00-UCL_ETHICS&AESTHETICS_i-278.indd9781787353008_Canada-in-the-Frame_pi-208.indd 3 3 11-Jun-1819/10/2018 4:56:18 09:50PM First published in 2020 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Collection © Editors, 2020 Text © Contributors, 2020 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Jackson, R., Jackson, N. and Brown, D. (eds). 2020. The Poetry of John Tyndall. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787359109 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creativecom mons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-78735-912-3 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-911-6 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-910-9 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-913-0 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-914-7 (mobi) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787359109 Frontispiece: Chalk drawing of John Tyndall c.1850, at the time he was writing many of these poems. Courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Contents Notes on contributors x Acknowledgements xi Editorial principles and abbreviations xii Poetry in context 1 John Tyndall: The poems 74 1 Acrostic (Maria) 75 2 In praise of Bruen 76 3 The Leighlin “Orators”—or, ‘The late repeal meeting’ 77 4 Carlow 79 5 The testimonial 81 6 The battle of the constitution is to be fought at the registry 84 7 Landlord and tenant 86 8 Lines sent with a forget me not 90 9 Acrostic (Christina Tidmarsh) 91 10 To Ginty 92 11 To Chadwick 93 12 Suggested on hearing High Mass in Saint Wilfred’s Chapel 96 13 On leaving Westmorland 98 14 An Hibernian’s Song. To— 100 15 Pour mon cher Jack 101 16 Such bliss 103 17 The day is gone 104 18 The aerial phantazies of youth 108 19 Acrostic (Elizabeth Barton) 111 20 Acrostic (Miss Hebdon) 112 21 To N—T 113 22 Acrostic (Jane) 114 23 More musical than twenty dozen rills 115 24 The star that gems life’s morning sky 116 25 We must part a while 118 26 Oh Mary pon my soul 119 CONTENTS vii 27 A desolate forlorn swain 120 28 Dont you remember love 123 29 With cloudy head 127 30 To Elizabeth 129 31 On being caught oversleeping when the postman came 131 32 Tyndall’s Ossian 134 33 No more dear Bill 137 34 The past 141 35 Yet, if to calm ungifted sight 142 36 Why did I e’er behold thee: A Valentine 144 37 Various couplets 145 38 I tread the land 146 39 The Sky, apostrophe to Friendship 147 40 And must I touch the string 150 41 Oh my cottage! 151 42 From the high hill 153 43 Johnny my dear 154 44 Beacon Hill 155 45 To Fanny 156 46 Retrospective poem 157 47 A snail crawled forth 159 48 Tidmarsh’s nose 161 49 The awful 30th 162 50 Acrostic 163 51 The clown and the bees: a fable after the manner of Aesop 164 52 The joys and the wishes 166 53 Society 167 54 All smatterers are more brisk and pert 169 55 Our seasons of joy 170 56 Alone 171 57 There is no cloud in heaven tonight 174 58 I cannot write of love as poets do 176 59 Brave hills of Thuring 177 60 To McArthur 179 61 My story of “the Screen” 180 62 Common the hum of the bee 181 63 On the death of Dean Bernard 182 64 Hail to thee, mighty runner! 184 65 The heights of Science 186 66 Dear Tom, the sky is gray 187 viii THE POETRY OF JOHN TYNDALL 67 Meditations before breakfast 188 68 God bless thee Poet! 189 69 The morning bell 190 70 Ballad of the Isle of Wight 192 71 What though the mountain breezes 203 72 The sea holds jubilee this sunny morn 204 73 There was an unfortunate Divil 205 74 To the moon 207 75 The queenly moon 209 76 From the Alps: a fragment/A morning on Alp Lusgen 210 Select Bibliography 216 Subject Index 221 Index of Names 223 CONTENTS ix Notes on contributors Roland Jackson is a historian and scientist, concentrating on the history, policy and ethics of science and technology. He has recently published a biography of John Tyndall, The Ascent of John Tyndall (OUP, 2018), and is one of the three general editors of the Tyndall Correspondence Project, which is publishing Tyndall’s extant correspondence in 20 volumes with Pittsburgh University Press. He was previously Chief Executive of the British Science Association, and Head of the Science Museum. He is currently a Research Associate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL, and a Visiting Fellow and Trustee of the Royal Institution. Nicola Jackson has a DPhil in behavioural neuroscience from Oxford University and has worked in Further Education colleges. In 2016–18 she completed an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University and the Poetry School, London. She has published a range of research papers and contributed to numerous public reports. Her poetry is published in journals and newspapers, and her poetry collection Difficult Women won the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize in 2018. Daniel Brown has written on nineteenth-century physics and literature studies in his book Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (OUP, 1997) and has since helped to develop this field in further writings, principally in the CUP title The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (2013), the first book-length study of such poetry. He is currently writing a study that explores the consequences of women’s exclusion from Victorian professional science as they are disclosed by poetry written by both Victorian scientists and women themselves. x THE POETRY OF JOHN TYNDALL Acknowledgements We offer particular thanks to The Royal Institution of Great Britain for giving us access to the previously unpublished manuscript poems and enabling us to publish them. Professor Frank James, formerly Head of Collections and Heritage, has been highly encouraging and supportive, and we thank also Charlotte New and Jane Harrison for their unflagging work in making the archives accessible to us. We are grateful to two anonymous referees, who gave us constructive feedback which was most helpful in our final revisions. We have benefited greatly from all the efforts of publishing The Correspondence of John Tyndall, of which one of us (Roland Jackson) is a general editor, and thank Professor Bernard Lightman and all those who have contributed to the project. We thank Pittsburgh University Press for permission to use endnotes from the handful of poems that have been published in the Tyndall correspondence. It has been a pleasure to work with UCL Press. We thank Chris Penfold, Jaimee Biggins, Margie Coughlin, Niranjana Anand, Liron Gilenberg, Lucy Hall, Servis Filmsetting and any others behind the scenes of whom we are unaware. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi Editorial principles and abbreviations Most of the poems published in this book exist only in handwritten manuscript form. In the few cases where there are contemporarily printed versions, we have published those versions here, with references to any further primary sources, including drafts. Where there are several drafts of an individual poem, including overlapping drafts, we have taken an editorial decision about where to start and end the version published here, commenting and quoting in an endnote if there are alternative lines in drafts that seem particularly significant. We have integrated all Tyndall’s own editorial drafting changes – such as crossings-out, insertions and any other alterations – to give a single reading. However, we have lodged our detailed raw transcripts with the Royal Institution, so that scholars who wish to follow up any particular poems may do so with more ease. About half the poems were not given specific titles by Tyndall, and in those cases a title is shown in brackets; we have generally taken the first few words or first line of the poem as this title.