Mary Chudleigh’s The Song of the Three Children Paraphras’d is a long poem, over 2000 lines, that turns and turns again to different biblical moments. It moves in whirling achronological fashion, from the creation to the apocalypse, back to the Fall and then forward to the New Testament redemption, then via the plaguey escape from Egypt to the three children, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who will not burn in the furnace in the Book of Daniel, and who, though enslaved, were ‘skilful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science’ (Daniel 1.4). This kind of biblical hopscotch is a speciality of early modern poetry, and all kinds of nuance and political-philosophical purpose can be lodged in its crevices.
What is astonishing however, is the scientific gloss that Chudleigh gives her poem in its prose preface. Here she explains why she has written a scientific poem, and ‘made use of the Cartesian Hypothesis’ of the Vortex, ‘because it gives me a noble and sublime Idea of the Universe’, with its multiple habitable Worlds. She explains why she has thought to engage with Thomas Burnet’s theo-geological-philosophical best-seller, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, and why, alongside this she detours into various other areas of natural philosophy, including the Doctrine of Pre-Existence and the always fraught question of how the soul inheres in the body.
What kind of a mirage is this, ours or hers, that a poem that might look to us like a thoroughly biblical work is so explicitly glossed as a scientific poem? What are we missing? What does it say about poetry as a medium for natural philosophy? If the questions hardly resemble our current parameters for ‘science’, they are nevertheless central to the era’s scientific preoccupations.
There is much else going on in the poem’s very conscious sense of fitting its poetics to its subject matter, that she uses the Pindaric Ode because it allows for a certain wildness, a lack of restraint in form, producing in turn, a freedom in thought, associative leaps and a panorama of intellectual perspective, that allows her, in turn, to link the scientific and the biblical. In fact, the three children’s ‘Song’ is its own text within the Apocrypha, whose litany of creation, cosmology and the natural world was widely understood to embody a particular hyper-knowledge, in which natural philosophy could become a kind of theology, and various writers – Thomas Walker in 1691, or Marc Le Pla in 1728) produce similar Paraphrases, albeit without the specifically scientific gloss.
The poem, it is true, remains very much within its scriptural subject matter, even while its account of the creation includes a masque-like dramatis personae of the natural world, light and stars, heat and winds, who are each invoked in turn, but hardly to the extent that we should think it to constitute Cartestian Vortex theory and its other scientific topics. What is at play is perhaps something quite different, where the science is less the subject matter than the interpretative lens. It is not the poem serving the science, but the other way round, where we bring our understanding of the natural world to biblical ‘history’, the vortex of all time, whirling around, for Chudleigh, in her retelling of the centrifugal biblical story.
What does this mean then, for trying to locate ‘scientific poetry and the poetics of science’. Sometimes, the science may be the subject matter of the poetry. There is a large mass of writing that deals explicitly with natural philosophy – in natural history, in medical, or botanical fields. But scientific poetry does not understand its job to be the dogsbody of ‘real’ science, carrying its bags and dutifully repeating its findings for a different audience. On the contrary, it sometimes prides itself on a certain wild fury, in its play and transformation of natural philosophy, or the dissonance of scale that it can embody. And as such, the scientific can lodge inside writing on quite different subjects. The science becomes a way to think, a tool, a methodology, without necessarily being the topic.
Extracts
Below are some short extracts from the preface and some stanzas from a poem that is more or less conspicuous in its natural philosophical character, describing the angelic racket of creation, the whirling of elements in the primal Chaos, out of which, warmed up and heaping themselves into body, the ‘lucid particles’ come to exist:
From the preface:
In Paraphrasing that part of the Hymn which mentions the Stars, I have made use of the Cartesian Hypothesis, that the Fixt Stars are Suns, and each the Center of a Vortex; which I am willing to believe, because it gives me a noble and sublime Idea of the Universe, and makes it appear infinitely larger, fuller, more magnificent, and every way worthier of its great Artificer. … How numerous are those huge Globes which roll over our Heads! And how many more may there be in those boundless Spaces above us, which we cannot possibly discover! And yet some are so vain, or rather so arrogant, as to suppose, that those glorious Orbs were made wholly for our Use; doubtless the wise Author of Nature design'd them for nobler Purposes than to give us Light and Heat, to regulate and diversifie our Seasons, and render our Nights agreeable: 'Tis highly probable that as many of them are Suns, so others are habitable Worlds, and fill'd with Beings infinitely superior to us; such as may have greater Perfections both of Soul and Body, and be by the Excellency of their Nature, fitted for much more rational and sublime Employments.
[Stanza 7]
Ye glitt'ring Stars, who float in liquid Air,
Both ye that round the Sun in diff'rent Circles move,
And ye that shine like Suns above;
Whose Light and Heat attending Planets share:
In your high Stations your Creator praise,
While we admire both him and you;
Tho' vastly distant, yet our Eyes we raise,
And wou'd your lofty Regions view;
Those immense Spaces which no Limits know,
Where purest Æther unconfin'd doth flow;
But our weak Sight cannot such Journies go:
'Tis Thought alone the Distance must explore;
Nothing but That to such a Height can soar,
Nothing but That can thither wing its Way,
And there with boundless Freedom stray,
And at one View Ten thousand sparkling Orbs survey,
Innumerable Worlds and dazling Springs of Light.
O the vast Prospect! O the charming Sight!
How full of Wonder, and Delight!
How mean, how little, does our Globe appear!This Object of our Envy, Toil and Care,
Is hardly seen amidst the Croud above;
There, like some shining Point, do's scarce distinguish'd move.
[Stanza 21] On the angels
Zeal tun'd their Harps, by it inspir'd they sung;
The charming Sound thro' all th' Empyrean rung:
Their God they with unweary'd Ardor bless'd,
And in their sacred Hymns his Praise express'd:
His Wisdom, Pow'r, and Goodness they admire,
These were the constant Themes of all th' Angelick Quire:
All these they saw on his new Work Imprest:
They saw his pow'rful Fiat soon obey'd;
He spoke, and streight that mighty Mass was made,
Where Earth and Water, Air and Fire,
Without Distinction, Order, or Design,
Did in one common Chaos join:
Stupid, unactive, without Form, or Light,
They lay confus'dly huddl'd in their native Night;
Till on the gloomy Deep his Spirit mov'd;
Th' Emanations of the Power Divine,
Did all its Parts with vital Influence bless,
And scatter'd thro' the whole their motive Energies.
Th' active Warmth did ev'ry Part impell,
The heaviest downward made their way,
And to a new made Centre fell,
Where, by their Weight together prest,
They did in one firm Body rest,
On which a Mass of Liquids lay:
The lucid Particles together came,
And join'd in one propitious Flame,
Which round the new-form'd Globe did Light and Heat convey,
And blest it with the welcom Birth of Day:
But to one Sphere the Fire was not confin'd,
Still a sufficient Stock was left behind,
Which thro' the Whole in due proportion went,
And needful Warmth to ev'ry Part was sent.
The poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, ed. Margaret J.M. Ezell (Oxford, 1993), p. 191.
The full poem, with its prose-preface insisting on its scientific content, can be found here.
Further Reading
- Bronwen Price, ‘In One Harmonious Song Combine': Inclusiveness, Toleration, and Liberty in Lady Mary Chudleigh's The Song of the Three Children Paraphras'd’, English: The Journal of the English Association, 62:237 (2013) 193-213
- Barbara Olive, ‘The Fabric of Restoration Puritanism: Mary Chudleigh’s The Song of the Three Children Paraphras’d’, in Puritanism and Its Discontents, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (University of Delaware Press, 2003), pp. 122–42
- Shannon Miller, Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)