The Scientist at Giverny

E. B. Smith, Jr.

I seek beyond Monet’s garden colour-wheel.    
My logic drills down to Platonic forms
nestled in dark soil beneath the restless shadows

to the sovereign scientific laws that cause  
the primal atoms of the universe to transverse,
enliven, and combine with space and time.

***

But how could there bloom a Giverny—      
green lagoons, pink blossoms, rose perfumes—
if Plato’s purity shaped only formulae

of neurons wired with optic rods and cones?
Our consciousness is real: creates, perceives,
subjective, coloured images—what we think we see.   

***          

Does a life-pulse seed the cosmos,   
one that science might surmise,      
but cannot feel?          

Or does physics, like an acid spill, 
burn belief to numbers
and to nil.

The Science

The science in the poem relates to two remarkable discoveries. First, the physics of matter and energy can be reduced to mathematical equations; and second, these laws are consistent throughout the universe, as if they were ideal Platonic forms: not invented by humans, but found. However, the poem also suggests that, beyond the laws of physics, there may exist alternative scientific and mathematical reality, sensed more through consciousness and art than through formulae. The poem contrasts the mechanistic universe of physics to that of Monet’s colours at Giverny, colours that evoke feelings about a lifeforce seeding transcendent beauty, purpose, and mystery. 

The Poet

E. B. Smith, Jr. holds degrees from Yale, Columbia, and New York University. He was Associate Executive Director of Kemper Foundation. He is co-author of Contemporary American Landscape Painting. He has a long-time interest in physics, consciousness, and cosmology. Most recently, several of his poems appeared in The Fortnightly Review.

Next poem: The Visible Universe by Bibhuti Narayan Biswal