poetic diction and scientific language

Poetic Diction and Scientific LanguageAuthor(s): John ArthosSource: Isis, Vol. 32, No. 2 (1940), pp. 324-338Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/226247 .

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Poetic Diction and Scientific Language

In the poetry of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries there is an abundance of words and phrases that are taken to be characteristic of the period. These ' stock' expressions, such as the vital air, la crystalline humeur, liquidi cristalli, les troupes volantes, the mineral kinds, and dozens of others, are generally considered mere elegant conceits or imitations of classic Latin phrases. Such explanations fail to define the precise uses of these phrases, and do not account for their repeated use. It happens, however, that a more complete explanation of the meaning and function of this language is to be found in studying the language of science in this period and in antiquity. Here I wish to indicate the nature of the problem of the relation of the language of poetrv and that of science, in this period particularly, and to show something of the principles of the lexicon of poetic diction I am now making.

As an example of the nature of the study we might notice the phrase, the liquid air, as DRYDEN used it

The fields of liquid air, inclosing all, Surround the compass of this earthly ball. (i)

There was of course the precedent in classical poetry

subitas candescere flammas aera per liquidum tractosque perire cometas rara per ingentis uiderunt saecula motus. (2)

The same phrase occurs in a digest of popular science in i643, where its use would hardly be for a poetical purpose. JOHN SWAN

was describing the means of locomotion of birds and fishes:

The one moves himself by his finnes, the other by his wings. The one cuts and glideth through the liquid aire, the other shoots and darteth through the humid water. (3)

(I) Ovid's Metamorphoses, Bk. I, vv. 6o-6i. (2) MANILIUS, .4stronomicon, Bk. I, vv. 8I4-8i6. (3) Speculum Mundi, second edition, London, i643, p. 383.



POETIC DICTION AND SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE 325

In i650 the phrase served the needs of an alchemist

A little before I said, that all things were made of the liquid aire, or the vapour, which theElements by a perpetuall motion distill into the bowells of the earth.... (4)

WALTER CHARLETON used the Latin form:

Animalia inspiciamus AEREA. quz generatim vocantur AVES (ab Hebrwo Aph, i.e. volans quia in aere liquido volant. (S)

Such a phrase, then, was used by scientists of various degrees of respectability, and it is clear that the meaning of the epithet liquid could be explained by ancient as well as contemporary theory. The notion that air was vapor was contradicted by EMPEDOCLES (6), but affirmed by ARISTOTLE:

... air is the form and water the material, the air in a sense being the actualizing of water, since the water is potentially air, as indeed the air is potentially water, but in a different way. (7)

In accordance with the division of the air into three regions, the Stoics considered the highest one liquid:

... non minus quadraginta stadiorum a terrd altitudinem esse, in qud nubila, ac venti, nubesque proueniant. Inde purum liquidumque, & imperturbatar lucis Aerem: sed a turbido ad Lunam, vicies centum millia stadiorum. Ima ergo pars, ad XL. stadia attollitur; mediam non definit; vltima & liquida amplissima, ad multa millia. (8)

The conception of a liquid air was also carried over into Christian physics, as in JOHN DAMASCENE:

L'air n'a nulle couleur de sa propre nature qui est aussi liquide & transpa- rente.... (9)

Certain followers of the Ptolemaic theory considered the air liquid:

(4) MICHEEL SANDIVOGIUS, A New Lioght of Alchymie, translated by J. FRENCH, London, I650, P. I2.

(5) Onomasticon Zoicon Plerorumque Animalium Differentias & Nomina Propria pluiribius Lingutis exponens, London, I668, p. 61.

(6) ARNOLD REYMOND, History of the Sciences in Greco-Roman Antiquity, translated by RUTH G. DE BRAY, New York n.d., p. 29.

() Thze Phtysics (Loeb Classical Library), I, 327. (8) JUSTUs Lipsius, Physiologia Stoiconmm Libri Tres, Antwverp, I604, P. IrI.

Lipsius is quoting SENECA, Quaestiones Naturales, lib. II. A similar notion is credited to ZENO in THOMAS STANLEY'S The History of Phzilosophy, The Eighth Part, London, i656, p. 0og.

(9) LAMBERT DANEAU, Physique Francoise, Geneva, r58i, p. 419.



326 JOHN ARTHOS

Ceux qui soutiennent la fluidite supposent que depuis la Terre jusq'aux Etoiles fixes ce n'est qu'un liquide, ou nagent tous les Epicles [sic] des Planetes. (Io)

The theory that air is vapor survived in WILLIAM GILBERT, who defined air as " humor per calorem in spiritum attenuatus," (iI) and there is the simple statement of the unknown translator of COMENIUS, " the air is a very liquid and moveable element. " (12)

In 1672 a French scientist wrote

Ainsi, I'air doit toujours estre liquide, & ne doit jamais se durcir, comme nous voyons qu'il arrive a 1'eau lors qu'elle se gele.... (13)

In the light of such theories, then, and of the language the scientists used to express those theories, it may be seen that the phrase, liquid air, was even for poetry more than an imitation of an obscure classical use. A similar situation in regard to the use of the phrase, liquid crystal, as a periphrasis for water, depends even more necessarily for explanation on the knowledge of a scientific theory. CHAPELAIN'S use is typical:

une Fontaine claire, Qui, cauant par son cours vn natural canal, Roule sur le grauier son liquide crystal. (14)

On first meeting such a phrase we should be concerned in discovering that the poet is using crystal to signify water, and next we should probably infer that he is describing clear and shining water. This latter consideration would be particularly obvious in reading such lines as these of SYLVESTER'S:

(io) CLAUDE GADROYS, Le Systeme du Monde, Paris, I675, p. 85. (i i) De iMundo Nostro Sublunari Philosophia Nova, ed. William Boswell, Amster-

dam, I 65 !, P. 29.

(I2) Naturall Philosophie Reformed by Divine Light, London, I65I, p. io6. (13) JACQUEs ROHAULT, Traite de Physique, vol. II, Amsterdam, i672, p. I90.

EDME MAJiorr= did much to clear up the confusion between fluiditv and liquiditv, in referring to air (C L'air & la flame sont des Corps Fluides; l'eau, l'huile, le mercure, & les autres liqueurs, sont des corps fluides & liquides; tout liquide est fluide, mais tout fluide n'est pas liquide. J'appelle liquide ce qui estant en suffisante quantite coule & s'etend au dessous de l'air, jusques a ce que sa surface superieure se soit mise de niveau; & parce que l'air & la flame n'ont pas cette propriete, je ne les appelle pas liquides, mais seulement fluides )). Traitd du Mouvement des Eaux et des Autres Corps Fluides, Paris, i686, pp. I-2.

(14) La Pucelle ou La France Delivree, Paris, i656, p. I35.




the emptie bubbles That rise when raine the liquiid christal troubles. (zI)

But still another consideration enters when the epithet liquid is replaced by such a word as molten, as for example in MILTON'S

lines to the water-spirit, Sabrina:

Nor wet Octobers torrent flood Thy molten crvstal fill with mudd. (i6)

Here we are drawn to remind ourselves of the meaning of the Greek word Kpv'araAAos, and to the theory that all solids, including minerals, were really liquids in solid form, and in fact merely different conditions of water. Specific applications of the theory are to be seen in PLATO:

The kinds of water are, primarily, two, the one being the liquid, the other the fusible kind. Now the liquid kind inasmuch as it partakes of those small particles of water which are unequal, is mobile both in itself and by external force owing to its non-uniformity and the shape of its figure. But the other kind, which is composed of large and uniform particles, is more stable than the first and is heavy, being solidified by its uniformity.... (I7)

The water that is mixed with fire, which is fine and fluid, is termed " fluid," owing to its motion and the way it rolls over the earth.... When this kind is separated off from fire and air and isolated it becomes more uniform, but because of their outflow it is compressed upon itself; and when it is thus solidified, the part of it above the earth which is most affected by this process is termed " hail," and the part upon the earth " ice" (Kpuoraoshos).... (i8)

Any confusion in the meaning of KCptaTaAXos- was to be resolved by reference to such a theory, as, for instance, Sir THOMAS BROWNE had occasion to resolve it in I646

Hereof the common Opinion hath been, and still remaineth amongst us, that Crystal is nothing else but Ice or Snow concreted, and by duration of time, congealed beyond liquation.... Pliny is positive in this opinion Crystallus fit gelu vehementius concreto: The same is followed by Seneca, Elegantly described by Claudian, not denied by Scaliger, some way affirmed by Albertus, Brasavolus, and directly bv many others. The venerable Fathers of the Church have also assented hereto; As Basil in his Hexameron Isidore in his Etymologies, and not

(I 5) The Furies, in Bartas, His Deuine Weekes and Workes Translated [London, I605.] p. 350.

(i6) Comus, vv. 929-930.

(17) Timaeus, 58D-E; Plato (Loeb Classical Library), VII, 145. (i8) Ibid., 3gD-E; VII, I49.



328 JOHN ARTHOS

only Austin, a Latine Father, but Gregorv the Great, and Jerome upon occasion of that term expressed in the first of Ezekiel. (i )

Theories similar to PLATO'S, that minerals were originally liquid, or to the notion of THALES that the primary element of all things was water, fitted into the various conceptions of the flux of nature which were important in the development of modern science, and in the early eighteenth century such a theory was adapted to NEWTON'S idea of nature as a ,,perpetual circulatory worker":

Water, which is a very fluid tasteless Salt, she [Nature] changes by Heat into Vapour, which is a sort of Air, and by Cold into Ice, which is a hard, pellucid, brittle, fusible Stone; and this Stone returns into Water by Heat, and Vapour returns into Water by Cold. (20)

There was also the variant theory that the natural state of water was solidity:

Water is Hard and Liquid successively. Its natural State is to be an Ice; that is, when no External Cause acts upon it, it remains Firm, and not Liquid. (2I)

And when we read COWLEY'S lines,

The beauteous Drop first into Ice does freez, And into solid Chrystal next advance, (22)

we need to refer to such a gloss as THOMAS LODGE supplied for SYLVESTER:

There are two sorts of Ice, according as the cold which restraineth the waters is extented or remisse. The one then which is ordinarie Ice (although it be very hard) yet for it is engendred of a cold that endureth not; so doth it melt in a little time. But the waters which congeale themsuelues, by a vehement, and very long cold (as for the space of ten or twelue continuall yeeres) are called Christall. (23)

Still another phrase in neo-classic poetry may be remarked on here to indicate the extent and the variety of relationship between

(ig) Pseudodoxia Epidemica, in Works, ed. GEOFFREY KEYNES, London, 1928, II, 87.

(20) Opticks, reprinted from the 4th edition (1730) with an introduction by E. T. WiHITTAKER, London, 1931, PP. 374-375.

(2i) EDME MARIOrrE, The Motion of Water, and other Fluids, Being a Treatise of Hydrostaticks, translated by J. T. DESAGULIERS, London, 17i8, p. 2.

(22) Ode upon His Majesties Restoration and Return, stanza 13, in Poems, ed. A. R. WALTER, Canbridge, 1905.

(Z3) A Learned Summarie upon the Famous Poeme of William of Salust, Lord of Bartas, London, i637, p. 139.




the languages of poetrv and science. In an apostrophe to the sun THOMSON wrote:

to the bowelled cavern darting deep, The mineral kinds confess thy mighty power. (24)

To explain the sense of mineral kinds here it is useful to refer to such a statement as ROBERT MIDGLEY'S in I687,

Mettals have their Seeds likewise, and as well as all things else are generated out of Seed. (25)

This theory had long held a place in Christian physics

Omnium igitur metallorum mater communis est ipsa Terra, quemadmodum & lob. 28. vers. I. & 2. & Deut. 8. vers. 9. perspicue dem6stratur. Nam illa suppeditat communem omnibus materiam, qua constant, nempe halitun quendam viscosum, sed humidiorem tamen eo, ex quo lapides cocrescunt. Hic igitur viscosus halitus lapideo humidior in locis subterraneis & in mediis ipsius terra visceribus vi quadam syderum & calore Solis e Terra exprimitur primu: postea verb frigore in eadem terra concrescit, & cum sicco terrestri perniscetur, ac agglutinatur. Vnde fit, vt pro diuersa ratione istius mixtionis, diuersa quoque ex eodem illo lento, pingui & viscoso humore metallorum genera nascantur atque producantur. (26)

There was a comparable alchemical theory

The seed of Metalls is truely, and really put into them: and the generation of it is thus. The foure Elements in the first operation of Nature doe by the help of the Archeus of Nature distill into the center of the earth a ponderous, or heavy Vapour of water, which is the seed of Metalls.... (27)

Metalls are brought forth in this manner. After the foure Elements have sent forth their vertues into the center of the earth, the Archeus by way of distillation sends them up unto the superficies of the earth, bv vertue of the heat of its perpetuall motion : for the earth is porous, and this wind by distilling through the pores of the earth, is resolved into water, out of which all things are made. Therefore let the sons of wisdorne know, that the sperm of metalls doth not differ from the sperm of all things, viz. the moist vapour.... (28)

And more respectably, one of the distinguished predecessors of LINNAEUS, TOURNEFORT, in the late seventeenth century gave wide

(24) Summer, vv. 133-134. (25) .4 NVew Treatise of Natural Philosophy, Free'd from the Intricacies of the

Schools, London, i687, p. 229. (26) LAMBERT DANEAU, Physices Christianae Pars Altera; Sive De Rerum Crea-

tarum NVatura, 4th edition, Geneva, I6o6, p. I03 recto. (27) SANDIVOGIUS, A New Light of Alchzymie, p. I9.

(28) Ibid., p. I1.



330 JOHN ARTHOS

currency to the notion of the growth of minerals from seeds (29). It is to such a conception, then, that such lines as these of

POPE'S are to be referred:

For me the balm shall bleed, and amber flow, The coral redden, and the ruby glow, The pearly shell its lucid globe unfold, And Phebus warm the ripening ore to gold. (30)

For a final example, one might notice the contemporary scientific use of a phrase which has hitherto been taken as one of the most precious of poetical periphrases, 'the scaly kind.' Such a phrase in scientific description distinguished between fish of rough, smooth, or scaly skins:

But for breeding and living, there is no fish so wonderfull amongst all the scaly or sheUy kinds, as there is amongst the smooth ones, viz. the common Eele.... (31)

With such evidence as this to go on, and there are dozens of phrases to be thus illustrated, it is apparent that the meaning of many words in the poetry of this period is enriched by a knowledge on our part of the use of these words in contemporary scientific writing. At times, the inductive habit of mind which is developed in classifying the natural world and in forming a language for that classification is evident in the choice of words and the framing of periphrases and metaphors in poetry. It is often certain that a term in poetry was used in direct imitation of the scientific use. But, in their turn, the scientists in this period were not to any great extent forming their vocabulary with words which they themselves had coined, or which were limited to a specialist's use. When they wrote in English, for example, their chief aim was clarity, and of a special sort. The style of the communications to OLDENBURG at the Royal Society was not recondite, but, as with other scientific writing, it had something of the easv formality of the age. It would seem that one was first a cultivated gentleman, and then a scientist, and the knowledge in which one was interested was communicated according to the grace of society. The dialogues of GALILEO and the discussion in The Sceptical Chymist among

(29) HONORE MARIA LAUTHIER, Lettre a Monsieur Begon ... Contenant, Un Abrege' de la Vie de 1M. De Tournefort, Paris, I717, p. 22.

(30) Windsor Forest, VV. 393-396. (3I) ROBERT PLOT, The NVatural History of Stafford-shire, Oxford, i686, P. 242



POETIC DICTION AND SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE 33I

a group of friends sitting in a garden have something of the charm and finish of the characters in DRYDEN's Essay of Dramatic Poesy.

The education of a scientist, then, would be of the greatest importance in determining the language he was to use, and his education would have been in a literary tradition. The growth of science in the Renaissance accompanied the flourishing of humanism, the study of the classical writers. And while the curriculum Milton set his students was perhaps severe, yet sooner or later most of the scientifically minded would have read his assignments for their own interest-CELSUS, PLINY, MANILIUS,

LUCRETIUS, OPPIAN, ARATUS, DIONYSius AFER. Those who were to write in English would have profited by Latin, but there were already English sources which had prepared a language for them. If a young scientist grew up in BOYLE'S time and was not set to a classical curriculum, he would probably have been sent to school to Du BARTAS (by way of SYLVESTER):

... the religiously-minded schoolmasters, and they were a much more important element than is ordinarily supposed, would draw their notions of animals, not from the progressive zoological writers, such as they were, nor from the old mediaeval sources, but from Du BARTAS's Premiire Semaine ou Creation du Monde or JoHN SWAN's Speculum Mundi, i635. (32)

And this observation might be expanded to include botany and astronomy. It has been put another way:

The man of pure science mav regret that generations should have busied themselves about anything so thoroughly unscientific; but with that point of view we are unconcerned. The important thing is that the generations in question learnt from Sylvester to take a poetical interest in the natural world . (33)

This is not the whole story but it is the center of it. One might wonder whether a scientist got his language from Greek and Latin writers, from Du BARTAS, SYLVESTER, or essayists in natural history such as CAMDEN and DRAYTON, or whether the long reading of BARTHOLOMEUS ANGLICUS through the centuries gave a vocabularv to common speech. What is at issue is not so much a matter of language as a tradition of thought-with such a tradition and such assumptions that PLOT, for example,

(32) FOSTER WATSON, The Beginnings of the Teaching of Modern Subjects in England, London, 1909, pp. 192-193.

(33) GEORGE SAINTSBURY, A History of Elizabethan Literature, Newv York, I912, PP. 290-29 1.



3 3 2 TOHN ARTHOS

fails to mention when he sets down the rules he has followed in his own descriptions:

And these I intend to deliver as succinctlv as may be, in a plain, easie, unartificial Stile, studiously avoiding all omaments of Language, it being my purpose to treat of Things, and therefore would have the Reader expect nothing less then Words.... (34)

But his words could treat of things only insofar as he had a scheme of nature into which those things fitted.

Such a tradition has been the concern of all poets who have been seriously devoted to the description of nature, and their problems have also been the problems of the scientists. It does not much matter if some of BOYLE'S words came from LUCRETIUS

or Du BARTAS, or if these men owed to DEMOCRITUS. The point is that what made such words serviceable to the scientists was often implicit in the use of the poets. And if we study the tradition of natural description in poetry we may see something of what is meant by this.

It has been said (35) that it was by virtue of ARATUS and the Alexandrians that LUCRETIUS and VIRGIL wrote as they did. At that time the world of the systematic philosophers had broken up, and the efforts of thought were being directed towards observing and cataloguing the details of the universe. Where HERACLEITUS and THALES and the rest had labored with synthesis, the Alexandrians were working with the phenomena of the special sciences. In a sense the world grew smaller, but the man, the student, grew more important, more self-centered in his knowledge. And the artists were also living in this world, relating the fragments of nature to their own experience and values. This was the problem for THEOCRITUS with the pastoral, of ARATUS with his catalogue of weather signs, of NICANDER's notations of the effects of drugs on life. And there were efforts in the epic to control these various interests before the gain of understanding them was dispersed, to bring them into some unity of expression, to establish that through poetry at least some synthesis of knowledge could be maintained.

It was this effort that was resolved for the time in LUCRETIUS

(34) The Natural History of Oxford-shire, Oxford, I677, p. 2.

(35) J. WV. MACKAIL, Lectures on Greek Poetrv, London, I91I, pp. r98-I99.



POETIC DICTION AND SCIENTIFIC LAiNGUAGE 33

and VIRGIL. Because EPICURUS' was so personal a philosophv and rhetoric it contented LUCRETIUS, who believed that the world had meaning only as a work of art. Fascinated, like the Alexandrians, with catalogues, he saw there was a poem in them. And in his serious honestv and love he made one. And VIRGIL, in a more contented place, centered man in the same world to explain the purposes of empire. It was a narrowly confined world.

And it dispersed again, and MANILIUS listed the stars, OPPIAN the fish, and AusoNIus followed the course of a river. Meanwhile the Christian world was growing, and the catalogues of the Alexan- drians found another use in the great legend of the Mosaic creation. For literature BASILIUS MAGNUS set the pattern. The life created by God those first six days in its continuing wealth was a continuing praise of Him. The world, from Gibraltar to India, had begun then, and it was praiseworthy to understand the extent of this universe, the detail, how all of it was His plan. WTith painstaking care BASIL read ARISTOTLE, AELIAN, STRABO, PTOLOMY, ARCHIMEDES, ERATOSTHENES, GALEN, and EUCLID, and he filled out the account of creation in Genesis with their knowledge. His sermons were treatises showing how the knowledge of nature is a means of understanding the wisdom of God. Those who followed his example from the fourth to the eighth centuries usually wrote in verse, and the convention of their religious poetry was developed in expanding the account of Moses in terms of the available scientific knowledge. And thus this school described the creation of plants and animals with the precision of the scientists, showing always how the great world of nature was linked with the little world of man, and how both were the manifest creation of the Holy Spirit. The Timaeus helped to consolidate and relate the material of Genesis and LUCRETIUS.

With the great revival of interest in the natural world in the Renaissance, poets like PONTANO and FRACASTORO were attracted toward Pagan rather than Christian sources. Later SPENSER and HENRY MORRE wrote in similar conceptions, but there developed another attitude, related to this, but more scientific and more literallv Christian, and which, though it sometimes shared sources with the other kind of poetrv, was to be more effective in defining a genesis and logos of nature. And this poetrv was to settle



334 JOHN ARTHOS

the diction for natural description in verse for two centuries to come.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the apologists of Christianity revived and tenaciously developed the approach of the patristic hexaemeral writers. For example, BASIL'S homilies were printed in I532 with a preface by ERASMUS. Latin translations were published in I5I5, I520, I523, I525, I53I, etc. Of some of the poems on the creation there were editions in I490 (JUVENCUS

HIsPANus), I5o8 (AvITUS), I5IO (HILARY OF POITIERS), I536 (MARIUS VICTOR), I558 (JUSTINUS). The poems of DRACONTIUS,

HILARY, VICTOR, AvITUS, and CYPRIANUS GALLUS were published in one volume in I560. And out of the interest which led to these printings modem poems were written on the same subject: Du BARTAS'S La Semaine (I578), TASSO's Le Sette Giornate del Mondo Creato (i 6oo), MURTOLA'S Della Creazione del Mondo (i 6o8), PAssERo's L'Essamerone (I609), and AcEvmo's Creacion del Mundo (I6I5).

The influence of the earlier on the later hexaemeral literature has been affirmed and denied, but a Belgian scholar's study of Du BARTAS, TAsso, and ACEVEDO has clearly established their obligations to the older authors (36). Passage after passage of TASSO is a translation or paraphrase of BASIL. Du BARTAS'S

borrowings were not made in this way, but there are explicit parallels to the older writers which in their sum indicate the extent of his reliance upon them. And for our purposes, since Du BARTAS and his translator SYLVESTER influenced so strongly the poetry and language of following generations, it will be useful to define something of the nature of the problems this poetry attempted to solve.

Looking at Du BARTAS'S poetry one sees that its meaning comes from a strange and unfortunate interaction between the two worlds that held conviction for him. His mind was intense with the knowledge that man was solitarv in the presence of God, and it was by this that the world had meaning. And on the other hand, there was his passionate preoccupation with the sensual nature of things. As a Protestant, the exaltation of his faith was

(36) MAURY THIBAUT DE MLAISIbRES, Les Poemes Inspires du Dibut de la Genise c l'Epoque de la Renaissance, Louvain: Librairie Universitaire, I931.




at once the purpose of poetry and the thing itself. And the natural world was to be described in poetry because evervthing in the creation, in its existence, in its rest or in its motion, was praising God and challenging His regard. Stones, birds, stars, were conscious with the desire to praise. Du BARTAS might use con- ventional mythology, or he might invent his own, but actually the language of description was valid only because it was religious, because the things of nature were, like men, instinct with purpose.

Le flot, comme parent, fauorisoit la terre, L'air du feu son cousin soustenoit le parti: Mais tous deux unissant leur amour departi, Peuvent facilement apointir la querelle Qui sans doute eust deffait la machine nouuelle. (37)

And as is the common result, when sense perceptions are the standards of certainty by which we judge the reality of the universe, nature is taken to be a machine.

Dieu est I'ame, le nerf, la vie, l'efficace, Qui anime, qui meut, qui soustient ceste masse. Dieu est le grand ressort, qui de ce grand corps Iouer diuersement tous les petis ressorts. Dieu est ce fort Athias dont l'imployable eschine Soustient la pesanteur de l'astree machine. (38)

And in the urgency of his religion and of his sensual understanding, Du BARTAS set out to write an encyclopedic poem.

Sans maistre & sans travail, en suqant le laict dous, Nous aprenions la langue entendue de tous: Et les sept ans passez, sur la poudre de verre Nous comnmnencions tirer la rondeur de la terre, Partir, multiplier : & montant d'art en art, Nous paruenions bien tost au sommet du rempart, Oui l'Encyclopedie en signe de victoire Couronne ses mignons d'une eternelle gloire. (39)

The Pleiade expressed doctrines that were of the greatest influence for the poetry of this age, and one principle of RONSARD's in particular was of prime importance to Du BARTAS:

Je te veux advertir de fuir les epithetes naturelz qu'ilz ne servent de rien a

la sentence de ce que tu veux dire, comme la riviere coulante, la verde rainee,

(37) La Sepmaine, ou Creation du Monde, XVe edition, Imprime par IEAN

DuR&NT, 158I (Second jour), p. 4i. (38) Septieme jour (I58i), p. 220.

(39) La Seconde Semaine ou Enjance du Monde, Anvers, 1584 (Babilone), p. I27.



336 JOHN ARTHOS

et infinis autres. Tes epithetes seront recherchez pour signifier, et non pour remplir ton carme, ou pour estre oyseux en ton vers: exemple, Le ciel voute encerne tout le monde, J'ay dit voute, et non ardant, clair, ny haut, ny azure. d'autant qu'une voute est propre pour embrasser et encemer quelque chose. Tu pourras bien dire, Le bateau va desur l'onde coulante, pour ce que le cours de 1'eau faict couler le bateau. (40)

The advice, then, was to choose an epithet not merely to describe the appearance of a thing but to indicate the circumstances of its being, and for Du BARTAS this came to mean the use of epithets to show the relationship of an object to the order of nature. Thus fire is named as 1'element plus haut (4I), fish are les bourgeois de la pleine liquide (42), mankind is la limonneuse race (43). And this principle informed not merely phrases, but lines and pages. And still another influence, that of the poets of the Jeux Floraux of Toulouse, propagated this same principle in support of the machine-like conception of the universe that they also held. Strengthened by the poetics of his own age, then, the central purpose of Du BARTAS, seems to grow out of the interest in the natural world that was vitally growing in this period, with all of the significant stress that had for the religious thinker. So humanism reinforced the growth of science, and the language of Du BARTAS'S natural philosophy brought together the vocabularies of the ancients in poetry and science as they were adapted to the same problem the hexaemeral writers had once faced. The world had meanwhile gone on, and it was in Du BARTAS'S poem that his age found this language turned to present need.

Du BARTAS'S influence in England came largely through SYL- VESTER'S translation (44), and SYLVESTER'S poetic method was his assimilation of Du BARTAS'S, modified in its expression by certain qualities of temperament and the nature of the English language. His translation was not literal, but one might say that his imagination was. Both for what there was in him that was taken for poetrv and for his presentation of natural knowledge, his influence represented rather fully the significance of Du BARTAS'S

(40) Abbrege de l'Art Poetique FranFoys, in cEuvres Completes, ed. HUCUES VAGANAY, t. IV, Paris: Librairie Garnier, 1923, pp. 478-479.

(41) Quatrieme Your (1581), p. II3.

(42) Ibid., p. I I2. (43) Sixieme jour (ir8i), p. 194.

(44) See W. R. ABBOT, Studies in the Influence of Du Bartas in England, r584- I64I, MS thesis (1931) in the librarv of the University of North Carolina.




attitude and the relation of that attitude to the growing strength of the scientific spirit.

Later MILTON'S influence became the great one to conjure with, and while he was not essentiallv touched with the experimental attitude of the members of the Royal Society, in his search for truth he was drawn to methods of definition which were also those of the inductive sciences. He too wrote in part in the hexaemeral tradition, but when we examine some of his phrases we see how closelv the traditions of poetry and science come together.

Som better shroud, som better warmth to cherish Our Limbs benumm'd, ere this diurnal Starr Leave cold the Night, how we his gather'd beams Reflected, may with matter sere foment, Or bv collision of two bodies grinde The Air attrite to Fire. (45)

"Matter sere" is a periphrasis for drv leaves or twigs which are to be kindled into fire by means of a glass concentrating the ravs of the sun. If this periphrasis is taken to be an attempt to express a common thing in lofty language, it would be contrarv to the style of the rest of the passage, which is precise (46). But the periphrasis " matter sere " will be considered consistent with the characteristics of the rest of the passage if we regard it in the light of what a nineteenth-centurv scholar had to say of the methods of scientific nomenclature:

The formation of a good descriptive language is, in fact, an inductive process of the same kind as those which we have already noticed in the progress of natural history. It requires the discovery of fixed characters. which discoverv is to be marked and fixed. like other inductive steps, by appropriate technical terms. The

(45) Paradise Lost, X, Io68-1073. (46) Foment has the severe force of the root meaning. Attrite was a term

of art: " Multa quoq; sunt ejus & prope violente procreationes, cim & solidorum ictu gignatur, ut lapidun : & attritu pressuque, ut igniariorum, quiq; impetu incitata feruntur, velut eorumn, que inflammantur liquanturque " (THEOPHRASTLS, De Igne Libellus, .4b Adriano Tturnebo illustratus, Hardevici, i656, p. I). Diurnal was constantlv used in scientific writing: But the first that I know of, who took in the consideration of the Earth's motion, (Diurnal and Annual) was Galil2o...." Philosophical Transactions, I (i666), 265. Guther'd beams is what a scientist later expressed as " the accumulation or concentration of the particles and the dry kindling is described as " the matter of heat " (GEORGE GREGORY, The Economy of Nature Explained and Illustrated on the Principles of Modern Philosopky, London, 1798, I, 175).



338 JOHN ARTHOS

characters must be so far fixed, that the things which they connect must have a more pernanent and real association than the things which they leave un- connected. (47)

And this is likewise the method of definition for such phrases in poetrv as scaly kind, liquid crystal, etc.

Thus on the evidence of vocabulary and certain habits of phrase formation it can be shown that there is a relationship between the languages of poetry and science in this period, and indeed in antiquity. Ultimately it is not possible to say where the language was first found, by the sailors who named the stars that they might tell each other how to make a certain course, or by the poets who named them for partly philosophic reasons. Later, BOYLE read DRYDEN, DRYDEN read BOYLE. The point is not one of priority, but the fact that the same words filled similar needs. What we call a tradition is merely this process, the acceptance of what can and must be used in order that expression shall find its satisfactory form.

It is in these terms that I propose to make a lexicon of the poetic diction for the period of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and I would call attention to this study here as an indication of the importance of the study of the growth of scientific language in itself and for its relation to poetry.

The University of Michigan. JOHN ARTHOS.

(47) WILLIAM WHEWELL, History of the Inductive Sciences, New York, i866, II, 391-



poetic diction and scientific language

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