Celebrating math-women with poetry is a project to
which I devoted several postings earlier this summer -- see, for
example, these June and July
entries. Moreover, I am looking for more such poems to post. Please
contact me (e-mail address is at the bottom of this blog-site) with poems about math-women that you have written or found.
Mathematician-astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) appeared in a poem by Siv Cedering on 21 July, 2012 and here she is again, this time celebrated by Adrienne Rich (1929-2012).
Planetarium by Adrienne Rich
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind
An eye,
‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us
Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
1968
I have “Planetarium” in The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 (W W Norton, 1984). It also is available, along with a bio and other poems by Rich, at www.PoetryFoundation.org.
Monday, September 3, 2012
An instrument in the shape of a woman
Labels:
Adrienne Rich,
astronomer,
Caroline Herschel,
discover,
instrument,
math-women,
mathematician,
monster,
moon,
planetarium,
poem,
woman,
women
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