Poe's Mythic Critique of Science and Romantic Childhood

“Sonnet—to Science” (1829). Poe composed his “Sonnet—to Science” in 1829 and revised it in 1843. The octet establishes the poem’s major tension: the poet refuses to pay homage to science, whose spirit he conceives as predatory—a “Vulture” that both penetrates and preys upon the poet’s heart. Poe deliberately adopts a neoclassical tone, in almost direct imitation of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which addresses the antique art object as the “foster-child of silence and slow time” (l. 2). Here science is the “true daughter of Old Time” (l. 1), but she proves sterile, since the persona asks, “How should he love thee?” (l. 5). Science alters what it sees and seems to transform what Poe most venerates: the eternal world of myth and imaginative possibility.

In its unsentimental analysis of nature, science would appear to have divested that very nature of its sacred mysteries. Poe’s antimaterialist position—his stance that scientific progress does not ensure a more beautiful quality of life—aligns him with several British Romantics, such as Blake, Dickens, Tennyson, and even the later filmmaker Charlie Chaplin (in Modern Times), all of whom deeply suspect that humanity’s moral life is not uplifted by science and technology. We can see something of the same disenchantment with science in Hawthorne’s story “The Celestial Railroad.”

The poet himself enjoys a classical conceit: he is Daedalus, the inventor of the labyrinth and the fashioner of those wings of wax that lifted him and his doomed son, Icarus, from Crete into the freedom of the air, having soared with “undaunted wing” (l. 8). Poe’s equation of science with the vulture likewise confers upon the poet the status of Prometheus, who suffered the tearing of his liver by this winged emissary from an angry Zeus for having delivered to humanity the sacred fire of Mount Olympus. The vulture’s wings are “dull realities” (l. 4), bequeathing to humanity a world bereft of myth.

In the sestet we reap the barren consequences of science’s invasion of our fanciful life. The Moon Goddess has been “dragged . . . from her car” (l. 9), the Hamadryad (l. 10) and Naiad (l. 12) exiled from their native haunts of wood and flood, the Elf sequestered from his green (l. 13), and the poet from his “summer dream” (l. 14). That the poet can no longer wander “to seek for treasure in the jeweled skies” (l. 7) robs him of his cosmic aspirations, and the skies are stripped of metaphysical value. Several female representatives of myth have fled Poe’s universe “to seek shelter in some happier star.” Science “tears” the fabric of fruitful illusion.

Moreover, the separation of the poet from his “summer dream beneath the tamarind tree” leaves him with the sobering thought of a world without illusions. A world perhaps ruled by Hades and Persephone. It is an eternal winter of spiritual discontent.

For Discussion or Writing.
1. Is there an inherent contradiction in Poe’s appraisal of “science” if his terms are entirely mythical? Is Poe’s a “realistic” notion of science—perhaps it might be relevant to consider his “scientific” hypotheses in his visionary essay Eureka?

2. How does Poe’s antiscientific attitude compare with Wordsworth’s stance on contemporary faith in “The World Is Too Much with Us” or with Blake’s cynical “The Garden of Love,” which also speaks of the robbing of the “green”?

“Romance” (1829). “Romance” is a relatively youthful piece by Poe. Poe’s personification of romance as a sentient being, a kind of teacher, aligns him with the Romantic movement in general (c. 1750–1850). The Romantic sensibility is credited to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau for having conceived, in his political and social polemics, particularly Emile, that the child is educated by nature.

We might recall that Poe’s contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne specifically defined romance as a “twilight” domain between hard fact and subjective fancy, almost a direct invitation to Rod Serling’s television Twilight Zone series. Poe alludes to Rousseau when he claims to have learned “my very earliest word / While in the wild wood I did lie” (ll. 8–9), as if he were a feral child, a version of Rousseau’s “Noble Savage.” We will see these concepts attributed to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and to Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli in The Jungle Books.

Set in two stanzas of roughly equal length, “Romance” seems similar to Emily Dickinson’s poems in some ways. Poe may have originated the use of the dash in American lyrics as a way of pointing up emphatic emotion or rarefied images. The two stanzas contrast visionary, carefree youth and disturbed, passionless maturity. The bird imagery of stanza 1 proves salutary: Romance “loves to nod and sing / With drowsy head and folded wing, / . . . To me a painted paroquet / Hath been—a most familiar bird—” (ll. 1–6). Romance is a dreamer, and its “medium” is the colorful parakeet, who “Taught me my alphabet to say—” (l. 7).

When Poe’s narrator claims that his tutelage under the bird was as “a child with a most knowing eye” (l. 10), he seizes upon two common notions of Romanticism. The first was proposed by William Wordsworth in his 1802 lyric “My Heart Leaps Up,” where he states that “the Child is father of the Man” (l. 7). The paradox is a Romantic tenet: our earliest impressions establish our fundamental nature, our personal and collective sensibility and capacity to feel.

The second concerns the “penetrating eye” or “Transparent Eyeball” of both the Masonic Illuminati and the poetic doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson—the idea of the “clear eyes of youth.” Childhood was venerated not only by Rousseau in Emile but in the poetic work of the British poets William Blake and Percy Shelley and the British novelists Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens. The violation of childhood, of one’s primal innocence, consistently warrants condemnation as the original sin.

Stanza 2 of “Romance” communicates a dire transformation: “Of late, the eternal Condor years / So shake the very Heaven on high / . . . I have no time for idle cares” (ll. 11–14). Life has taken a predatory, convulsive turn, and the “tumult” as the years “thunder by” (l. 13) more than suggests Milton’s pandemonium in heaven when the forces of Satan assault God’s kingdom. The orphic power of youthful vision is forfeit.

Time spent with “lyre and rhyme” (l. 18), the healing powers of Apollo and the Muses, are become “forbidden things!” (l. 19). When the narrator guiltily confesses, “My heart would feel to be a crime / Unless it trembled with the strings” (ll. 20–21), we can say of men, with the poet William Butler Yeats, “Their hearts have not grown old” (“The Wild Swans at Coole” l. 22). The consolation in this poem occurs at the word unless (l. 21), which suggests that musical inspiration and passion that occasionally descend upon him in “an hour with calmer wings” (l. 16) can move the poet’s soul in spite of himself. The recovery of poetic insight is still possible.

For Discussion or Writing.
1. What kinds of events or concerns might grab the narrator’s attention when he is “gazing on the unquiet sky” (l. 15)? Why might such events divert him of his childhood freedom?
2. Compare Poe’s vision of youth in “Romance” to Dickinson’s vision of nature in her lyric “These are the days when Birds come back – .” How are their estimations of “original innocence” comparable?