Although the genre of scientific poetry has its roots in the ancient Rome, at the end of the 18th century and during the 19th century, due to the great advances in science, both scientists and poets wrote poems alluding to science. The American poet Edgar Allan Poe, famous for his poem “The Raven", among other literary works, wrote "Sonnet to Science" in 1829.
The English language of the original poem is a cultivated language with some terms that are no longer used today. Throughout the poem you can notice an almost reverential admiration of Poe to science that, absorbed, contemplates it forgetting the rest under a tamarind tree.
Here is the
poem (and if you look for it in Spanish, please see this article in the Spanish
version of this blog):
Sonet to science
by Edgar Allan
Poe
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
to seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
and driven the Hamadryad from the wood
to seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
the Elfin from the green grass, and from me
the summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
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