(With a soul superadded, understood)
And kin to me, or so I thought, when young.
For all seemed fashioned from the self-same stuff,
Mythic gold yolk and glassy albumen
Of ancient Egypt 's fabled Mundane Egg,
Laid in the Void by sable-plumaged Night.
From which sprang Eros, all in feathered light
Who fecundated Chaos, wherein formed
Germens of all that lives and moves on Earth.
The Orphic fables in their riddling wit
Pointed us there, perhaps, towards a truth.
I sought to know the origins of life.
I thought it lawful knowledge. Did not God
Who made my hands and eyes, lend me the skill
To make my patient copper mannikin
Who held the lenses, variously curved
Steady above the living particles
I learned to scry and then to magnify
Successively in an expanding scale
Of diminution or of magnitude,
Until I saw successive plans and links
Of dizzying order and complexity?
I could anatomise a mayfly's eye,
Could so arrange the cornea of a gnat
That I could peer through that at New Church Tower,
And see it upside down and multiplied,
Like many pinpoints, where no Angels danced.
A moth's wing scaly like a coat of mail,
The sharp hooked claws upon the legs of flies-
I saw a new world in this world of ours-
A world of miracle, a world of truth
Monstrous and swarming with unguessed-at life.
That glass of water you hold to my lips,
Had I my lenses, would reveal to us
Not limpid clarity as we suppose-
Pure water-but a seething, striving horde
Of animalcules lashing dragon-tails
Propelled by springs and coils and hairlike fronds
Like whales athwart the oceans of the globe.
The optic lens is like a slicing sword.
It multiplies the world, or it divides-
We see the many in the one, as here,
We see the segments of what once seemed smooth,
Rough pits and craters on a lady's skin,
Or fur and scales along her gleaming hair.
The more the Many were revealed to me
The more I pressed my hunt to find the One-
Prima Materia, Nature's shifting shape
Still constant in her metamorphoses.
I found her Law in the successive Forms
Of ant and butterfly, beetle and bee.
I first discerned the pattern of the growth
From egg to simple grub, from grub encased,
Shrinking in part, in other putting forth
New organs in its sleep, until it stir,
Split and disgorge the tattered silk, which fast
Trembles and stiffens and then takes the air
Unfurled in splendour, tawny, sapphire blue,
Eyed like the peacock, tiger-barred, or marked
Between its wings with dark death's eyeless head.
Within the crystal circle of the lens
My horny thumbs were elephantine pads.
I fashioned me a surgeon's armoury-
Skewers and swords, scalpels and teasing hooks-
Not out of steel, but softest ivory,
Sharpened and turned beyond our vision's range,
Lances and lancets, that the naked eye
Could not discern, beneath the lens's stare.
With these I probed the creatures' very life
And source of life, of generation.
Their commonwealths are not as we supposed.
Lay out the ant-hill's Lord, the beehive's King
The centre of the patterns that they weave
Fetching and carrying, hurrying to feed,
Construct and guard their world, the pinnacle
Or apex of the social hierarchy-
Lay out this creature on the optic disk,
Lay bare the seat of generation
The organs where the new lives lie and grow,
Where the eggs take their form. She is no King
But a vast Mother, on whose monstrous flanks
Climb smaller sisters, hurrying to tend
Her progeny, to help with her travail,
Carry her nectar and give up their lives
If needs be, to save hers, for she is Queen,
The necessary Centre of the Brood.
It was these eyes first saw the Ovaries,
These hands that drew them, and this fading mind
Discerned the law of Metamorphosis
And wrote it down to show indifferent men.
I had no honour of it. Not at Home-
My father cast me bankrupt in the street-
Nor 'mongst my peers in Medicine. When, by Want
Driven to sell my library of slides,
My demonstrations and experiments,
I found no Buyer, nor no man of Science,
Philosopher or Doctor, who would take
My images of Truth, my elegant
Visions of life, and give them hope to last.
And so I came to penury and beg
For sops of bread and milk and scraps of meat
Scattered with maggots of the self-same flies
I marked the breeding of.