NEWTON

If I saw farther,‘ twas because I stood

On giant shoulders,” wrote the king of thought,

Too proud of his great line to slight the toils

Of his forebears. He turned to their dim past,

Their fading victories and their fond defeats,

And knelt as at an altar, drawing all

Their strengths into his own; and so went forth

With all their glory shining in his face,

To win new victories for the age to come.

So, where Copernicus had destroyed the dream

We called our world; where Galileo watched

Those ancient firmaments melt, a thin blue smoke

Into a vaster night; where Kepler heard

Only stray fragments, isolated chords

Of that tremendous music which should bind

All things anew in one, Newton arose

And carried on their fire.

Around him reeled

Through lingering fumes of hate and clouds of doubt,

Lit by the afterglow of the Civil War,

The dissolute throngs of that Walpurgis night

Where all the cynical spirits that deny

Danced with the vicious lusts that drown the soul

In flesh too gross for Circe or her swine.

But, in his heart, he heard one instant voice.

“On with the torch once more, make all things new,

Build the new heaven and earth, and save the world.”

Ah, but the infinite patience, the long months

Lavished on tasks that, to the common eye,

Were insignificant, never to be crowned

With great results, or even with earth's rewards.

Could Rembrandt but have painted him, in those hours

Making his first analysis of light

Alone, there, in his darkened Cambridge room

At Trinity! Could he have painted, too,

The secret glow, the mystery, and the power,

The sense of all the thoughts and unseen spires

That soared to heaven around him!

He stood there,

Obscure, unknown, the shadow of a man

In darkness, like a grey dishevelled ghost,

— Bare-throated, down at heel, his last night's supper

Littering his desk, untouched; his glimmering face,

Under his tangled hair, intent and still,—

Preparing our new universe.

He caught

The sunbeam striking through that bullet-hole

In his closed shutter — a round white spot of light

Upon a small dark screen.

He interposed

A prism of glass. He saw the sunbeam break

And spread upon the screen its rainbow band

Of disentangled colours, all in scale

Like notes in music; first, the violet ray,

Then indigo, trembling softly into blue;

Then green and yellow, quivering side by side;

Then orange, mellowing richly into red.

Then, in the screen, he made a small, round hole

Like to the first; and through it passed once more

Each separate coloured ray. He let it strike

Another prism of glass, and saw each hue

Bent at a different angle from its path,

The red the least, the violet ray the most;

But all in scale and order, all precise

As notes in music. Last, he took a lens,

And, passing through it all those coloured rays,

Drew them together again, remerging all

On that dark screen, in one white spot of light.

So, watching, testing, proving, he resolved

The seeming random glories of our day

Into a constant harmony, and found

How in the whiteness of the sunlight sleep

Compounded, all the colours of the world.

He saw how raindrops in the clouds of heaven

Breaking the light, revealed that sevenfold arch

Of colours, ranged as on his own dark screen,

Though now they spanned the mountains and wild seas.

Then, where that old-world order had gone down

Beneath a darker deluge, he beheld

Gleams of the great new order and recalled

— Fraught with new meaning and a deeper hope —

That covenant which God made with all mankind

Throughout all generations: I will set

My bow in the cloud, that henceforth ye may know

How deeper than the wreckage of your dreams

Abides My law, in beauty and in power.