Given the quotations from Keats in “Lamia”, and the featuring of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” on this Just Beauty blog platform, it seems appropriate to re-recommend a rather old, book.
This is Richard Dawkins’ response to the passage in “Lamia” where Keats accuses philosophy (aka the science of Newton’s time) of removing the awe from the rainbow.
“….Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— Unweave a rainbow…”
Wonderful Keats poetry. Clearly crafted from when Keats, at a dinner with Wordsworth toasted “Confusion to the memory of Newton!”. When Wordsworth asked for an explanation before he drank the toast, Keats replied “because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism”. Such limited insight in a great poet. Let’s attribute it to the quantity of wine flowing. Alcohol dulls the wits.
The counterposing of artistic feeling and expression to the acquisition of scientific knowledge (and the awe which accompanies it) may give some artists a faux belief that they somehow have a superior understanding of the world, rather than merely a different one.
To dispel this conceit, Dawkins explains the awe which accompanies the dissection of light into its colours, both the (parochially) visible and the much more fascinating and extensive invisible realms. He shows how the scientific “Unweaving of the rainbow” takes us into previously undreamed of worlds of wonder, far more mind-stretching and profound than merely conjuring-up gnomes or angels .
Dawkins is against counterposing the artistic and the scientific for just this reason. I agree with him. Enjoy…
B L
I very much agree. I have got a real sense of awe and wonder reading Dawkins’s own works about the natural world, such as The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene.