Darwin: A Life in Poems - Hardcover

Padel, Ruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307272397 ISBN 13: 9780307272393

Publisher: Knopf, 2009

Synopsis

This remarkable book brings us an intimate and moving interpretation of the life and work of Charles Darwin, by Ruth Padel, an acclaimed British poet and a direct descendant of the famous scientist.

Charles Darwin, born in 1809, lost his mother at the age of eight, repressed all memory of her, and poured his passion into solitary walks, newt collecting, and shooting. His five-year voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, when he was in his twenties, changed his life. Afterward, he began publishing his findings and working privately on groundbreaking theories about the development of animal species, including human beings, and he made a nervous proposal to his cousin Emma.

Padel’s poems sparkle with nuance and feeling as she shows us the marriage that ensued, and the rich, creative atmosphere the Darwins provided for their ten children. Charles and Emma were happy in each other, but both were painfully aware of the gulf between her deep Christian faith and his increasing religious doubt. The death of three of their children accentuated this gulf. For Darwin, death and extinction were nature’s way of developing new species: the survival of the fittest; for Emma, death was a prelude to the afterlife.

These marvelous poems—enriched by helpful marginal notes and by Padel’s ability to move among multiple viewpoints, always keeping Darwin at the center—bring to life the great scientist as well as the private man and tender father. This is a biography in rare form, with an unquantifiable depth of family intimacy and warmth.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Padel is a prizewinning poet, a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Zoological Society of London, and the first Writer in Residence at Somerset House, London. Her poetry collections include Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Voodoo Shop, and The Soho Leopard, all short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She has also published two much-loved books on reading contemporary poetry, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey, and an acclaimed nature book, Tigers in Red Weather, which was short-listed for the Kiriyama Prize.

Reviews

That Padel is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter adds the allure of curiosity to her contribution to observance of his natal bicentenary. That’s good, because appreciative readers of this year’s celebratory batch of new biographies and new editions of Darwin’s writings stand to be keenly affected by this superbly crafted book. Rather than rewrite the letters, journals, and memoirs of her forebear and his associates, Padel pours them, as verbatim as rhythm and lineation allow, into unrhymed verses and stanzas most often resembling classical Latin couplets but also arrayed in repeating three-, four-, and five-line units and as faux blank verse. Padel’s own original writing fleshes out narration and description, though she is sparing with it, letting the native rhythms of the prose of well-educated yet nonliterary nineteenth-century upper-middle-class people envelop us with their intelligent passion. If she omits a few important episodes—most notably his experiences at Tierra del Fuego during the Beagle’s voyage—she definitely gives us a Darwin with whom we can wonder and feel, smile and weep. --Ray Olson

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE

BOY

1809–1831


FINDING THE NAME IN THE FLOWER

I

THE CHAPEL SCHOOL

‘He brought a flower to school. He said his mother
taught him to look inside the blossom
and discover the name of the plant.
I inquired how it could be done
but the lesson was not transmissible.’
A walk through the zebra maze, to the Unitarian
chapel on Claremont Hill. What do they say,
the black stripes on white house-walls? He ’s afraid
of the dogs on Baker Street. When boys play
he chews the inside of his mouth. He can never fight.

Darwin grew up in Shrewsbury, a medieval English town on the border of Wales, where his father built a house in 1800. Early in 1817, when he was a timid boy of seven, his mother enrolled him in a small school attached to the Chapel in town. The words quoted here come from the earliest memory of Darwin by anyone other than his family: William Leighton, an older pupil at the school who later
became a botanist.


II

THE YEAR MY MOTHER DIED

‘I remember her sewing-table, curiously constructed.
Her black velvet gown. Nothing else
except her death-bed. And my Father, crying.’ No embrace.
‘My older sisters, in their great grief,
did not speak her name.’ Her memory was silence.
No memento of her face.

Darwin’s mother Susanna, daughter of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, died young in July 1817, when Darwin was eight.


III

STEALING THE AFFECTION OF DOGS
He does not seem to have known half how much our father loved him. --Caroline Wedgwood, née Darwin

Bits of the world blow towards him and come apart
on the wind. He invents. He lies.
‘I had a passion for dogs. They seemed to know.
I was adept in robbing their masters of their love.’
He steals apples from the orchard, gives them to boys
in a cottage and tells them to watch how fast he runs.
He climbs a beech by the wall of the locked kitchen garden
and dreams himself into the inner gloss
of raspberry canes. A forest, glowing in its net.
Emerald coal in a watchman’s brazier.
He straddles the coping, fits a stick in the hole at the foot
of a flower-pot, and pulls. Peaches and plums
fall in. Enough to have begun an orchard of his own.
My father’s. Valuable. The words hang in the trees
when the soft blobs are gone. He hides his loot
in shrubbery and runs to tell:
he has found a hoard of stolen fruit!

The Mount, Shrewsbury, 1817–20.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307272397
• ISBN 13: 9780307272393
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160