Poem of the Week 2024/48

The Dimensions of the Milky Way

    (Discovered by Harlow Shapley, 1918)

Behind the men's dorm

at dusk on a late May evening,

Carver lowers the paper

and watches the light change.

He tries to see Earth

across a distance

of twenty-five thousand light-years,

from the center of the Milky Way:

a grain of pollen, a spore

of galactic dust.

He looks around:

that shagbark, those swallows,

the fireflies, that blasted mosquito;

this beautiful world.

A hundred billion stars

in a roughly spherical flattened disc

with a radius of one hundred light-years.

Imagine that.

He catches a falling star.

Well, Lord, this

infinitesimal speck

could fill the universe with praise.

– Marilyn Nelson

This is from a sequence of poems on the life of George Washington Carver, who was born enslaved and became a prominent scientist & educator in post-Reconstruction America.

This poem hovers between the factual, sometimes all too real world around us & one made up of the fancy & imagination inside us: a liminal space natural for a man sitting in the dusk after a long day of work. The opening lines give us time & place, & with the first mention of Carver, & his first action – lowering the newspaper he has been reading – moves us away from the workaday world, the world of work & journalism & the specific time & place one occupies, into a world more open to speculation: he watches the light change.

Light is a longtime symbol of wisdom (as in the term enlightenment) & even of God (who will make a reappearance at the end of the poem; we can infer that Carver was a religious man). It is also, of course, actual light, a phenomenon of interest to & subject to analysis by a curious scientific mind like Carver's. He knows the measurement of the Milky Way, but it's an imaginative leap on his part to take himself out of his evening seat, & even out of this planet, into a celestial vantage point: what is our home, the Earth, seen from afar? A speck, but significantly the tiny items it's compared to – a grain of pollen, a spore – are both, though tiny, generative, capable of reproducing or helping to reproduce much larger organisms. Even the presentation of the pollen, as a grain, adds to the sense that these miniscule, almost unseeable cells can be fructifying.

We are brought back to Earth by another action of Carver's: he looks around, but in his mind now is the immensity of the galaxy & the smallness of Earth. But what he sees may be small but does not come across as insignificant: shagbark (a type of large hickory tree), swallows, fireflies, a mosquito. And these are very individual things that he sees: that shagbark, those swallows, a mosquito: not generic "trees" or "birds" but specific examples of specific varieties. And from the human perspective, not all are desirable: trees, birds, & fireflies are lovely, but that blasted mosquito! The bloodsuckers are also part of this world, this beautiful world, as Carver thinks in an emotionally open & resounding way. (The political situation of Carver's time, one inimical to a Black man like himself, does not enter directly into this poem, but the reader would be conscious of it, & it provides the context for Carver's meditations on our place in the Universe & the beauties of our world despite all that humanity has done to make things ugly & dangerous.)

The poem then moves again towards the factual & scientific, yet it transitions with a "poetic" image: a hundred billion stars. This immensity both conjures up a striking picture & is a straightforward description of the Milky Way. Carver fits these sparklers into their appropriate geometric container, & considers the container's radius. Then we move into Carver's free-flowing inner thoughts, indicated in italic type. He begins with the phrase Imagine that. This is both a conventional thing to say, equivalent to "just think of it!" or "who would have guessed!" but it's also an injunction: imagine that, conjure up in your mind both the grand & particular realities of the universe &, at the same time, both the smallness & the immense beauty of the physical world we inhabit. Only a sense of sustained wonder can balance such disparate elements.

These final thoughts are interrupted by a final action on Carver's part: he catches a falling star. To catch can mean to observe something, often something that might easily be missed ("Did you catch that?", said of both words & actions) but it also gives us the suggestion that Carver has caught a falling star: a literal impossibility, of course, but a metaphorical reality. The phrase brings to mind Donne's famous song, opening Go, and catch a falling star, in which the catching is the first of a list of vivid & impossible tasks. A falling star is often considered a fortunate thing to see (hence the superstition that you should make a wish when you see one); it's certainly a lovely & encouraging image, thinking of a tired scientist & teacher, struggling to carry on despite the social system surrounding him, & despite human frailty & evil in general, managing to catch this marvelous Universal thing. The possibilities of our tiny Earth, already compared to a speck, but a generative one, fill Carver's mind as he thinks of it filling the Universe with praise, praise here directed to a creating Deity, but also capable of echoing, through the imagination, through the vast Milky Way. We know both the physical measure of the Milky Way, & its spiritual immeasurability.

I thought this would be a good poem for Thanksgiving week. I took it from Faster than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996 - 2011, by Marilyn Nelson.