Cosmologia by Erasmus Darwin, edited by Stuart Harris, Harris, 拢8, ISBN 0954215109 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
ERASMUS DARWIN wrote in coupled rhyme/To please the learned public of his time./To read him now, with later, cooler eye,/Is somewhat harder, but it鈥檚 worth a try. After reading this tribute to the works of Charles鈥檚 grandfather, the rhythms he used tends to linger.
Darwin was a noted 18th-century physician, as well as a famous poet. Many people thought he was the greatest of his generation, which included William Cowper and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This selection from his seemingly inexhaustible flood of rhyming couplets has been arranged and published by Stuart Harris. He has given the collection the title Cosmologia to reflect Darwin鈥檚 interest in science and technology, which often informed his poetry.
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Like his grandson, Darwin had his own ideas about the origin of life on Earth and its development, and these figure in the last part of the collection, 鈥淭he Temple of Nature鈥�.
Cosmologia also contains long cantos on the four classical elements, earth, air, fire and water. Astonishing talent is richly displayed here: there isn鈥檛 a single leaden line. The unvarying metre and inevitable rhyming pairs ought to prove monotonous, and the apostrophising (鈥淪ylphs! Aquatic Nymphs!鈥�) grandiloquent, but in fact it is exhilarating.