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When the moon is in
the seventh house
And Jupiter aligns
with Mars,
Then peace will guide
the planets,
And love will steer
the stars;
This is the dawning
of the age of Aquarius,
The age of Aquarius.
This from
James Rado (1939 - ) and Gerome Ragni (1942 – 1991), in Hair
(1966).
We have,
I think, all been impressed by the triumph of the landing and
now the deployment of the Mars rover, Spirit. Mars has been the
source of many fantasies over the years: the planet is similar
in size to the Earth, and is reasonably close to us.
Giovanni
Virginio Schiaparelli (1835 – 1910) was an astronomer. He studied
at the University of Turin and Berlin Observatory and worked for
over forty years at Brera Observatory. He observed objects in
the solar system, and after observing Mars in 1877 he named the
"seas" and "continents". He also noted what
appeared to be channels, possibly carved by ancient rivers or
glaciers. When his report of the channels was translated into
English, the word 'canali' was mistranslated as ‘canals’.
Canals are not a natural phenomenon and this unfortunate mistake
seemed to point to the existence of a Martian civilisation.
His niece
Elsa Schiaparelli became a fabled couturier.
Several astronomers
latched onto the ‘canal’ idea despite Mr. Schiaparelli's protestations
and public interest grew. The most important of these was Percival
Lowell (!855 – 1916). He came from one of the two most important
Boston families:
I come
from the City of Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod;
Where Lowells speak only to Cabots,
And Cabots speak only to God.
The Lowell
family was extremely wealthy, so much so that Lowell totally financed
the observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, which now bears his name.
There can be no doubt that Lowell was an accomplished mathematician.
His calculations concerning gravitational perturbations to the
movement of the planet Neptune, paved the way towards the discovery
of the planet Pluto, some 14 years after Lowell's death.
 When
it came to Mars, however, things were quite different. Undoubtedly
Lowell was influenced by Schiaparelli. Yet he believed increasingly
that the geometrical patterns he maintained he could see on Mars
were the work of intelligent beings, irrigating on a truly vast
scale a vegetation whose seasonal reawakening spread from the
poles to the equator. He published a number of very popular books
on the subject that enjoyed great influence and success. Lowell's
maps of Mars became more geometrical as time went by.
Percival
Lowell's books on Mars and its canals were not only popular; they
influenced a number of popular fantasy writers of the day. H.G.
Wells (1866 – 1946) published his War of the Worlds in
1898, shortly after Lowell's first Mars book. In 1912, four years
after Lowell published his last book Mars as the abode of life,
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 – 1950), best known for Tarzan,
published The Princess of Mars and followed it with a series
of Mars fantasies.
Even at the
height of the popularity of the Martian canals theory around the
turn of the century there were a few experienced and keen sighted
observers who would have none of it. Eugene Antoniadi (1870 –
1944) was one such astronomer, blessed with acute vision and with
access to the finest telescopes in Europe, situated at altitudes
where atmospheric 'seeing' conditions were at their best. Antoniadi
maintained that Lowell had been on the verge of seeing true fine
detail but he ended up 'joining the dots'.
Mars the
planet was named after the Roman god of war: tradition made him
the father of Romulus and Remus, by the vestal Rhea Silvia. The
early poets wrote poems to Mars the god: Chaucer (1340 – 1400)
wrote The Compleynt of Mars (the word ‘compleynt’ means
‘ballad’ or ‘lay’). In it is described Mars’ view of the slavery
to which Venus forces him by his love for her. I’m not going to
attempt to use it in this article – the language is very difficult
to read in the original, and I don’t want to attempt a translation
into modern English. Another time, maybe!
There are
also poems that refer to Mars the heavenly body – the red star,
rather than the planet. Here is a small poem by Walter de la Mare
(1873 – 1956), Wanderers:
Wide are
the meadows of night,
And daisies are shining there,
Tossing their lovely dews,
Lustrous and fair;
And through these sweet fields go,
Wand'rers 'mid the stars---
Venus, Mercury, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars.
'Tired in their silver, they move,
And circling, whisper and say,
Fair are the blossoming meads of delight
Through which we stray.
 My
first poem for this week is not exactly about Mars, or about space
in the usual sense; but I think you will see why I have chosen
it. It is High
Flight, written by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee,
Jr., (1922 – 1941). Born on June 9, 1922, in Shanghai, the son
of American missionaries (John Gillespie Magee and Faith Emmeline
Backhouse), John Gillespie Magee Jr. received his education at
the American School, Nanking (1929-31), St. Clare's near Walmer,
Kent (1931-35), Rugby School (1935-39), and Avon Old Farms School,
near Hartford, Connecticut (1939-40). Young Magee won the Rugby
Poetry Prize in 1939 for his Brave New World, and after
returning to America privately published a collection of his poems.
Although he had been accepted at Yale University in July 1940,
Magee joined the Royal Canadian Air Force that year. He received
flight training in Ontario at Toronto, Trenton, St. Catherine's
and Uplands, and passed his Wings Test in June 1941. He was sent
overseas to Llandow in South Wales, Royal Air Force Digby (Lincolnshire)
and Wellingore, during which period he had the rank of Pilot Officer.
Magee flew the Spitfire as part of No. 412 Fighter Squadron. On
September 3, while test-flying a Spitfire V, Magee began writing
the sonnet we know now as High Flight at 30,000 feet. He
finished it upon landing and sent a copy to his parents. His father,
Assistant Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square,
Washington, D.C., printed it in the church magazine.
On December
11th, 1941, his Spitfire V crashed after a mid-air collision in
the clouds with a trainer plane from RAF Cranwell. He was one
of the first US war casualties (America had only entered the conflict
on December 7, when Pearl Harbour was attacked). He was 19 years
old at the time. His remains are buried in the churchyard cemetery
at Scopwick, Lincolnshire.
American
and British newspapers reprinted High Flight widely following
his death after Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, displayed
it in an exhibition of poetry, "Faith and Freedom,"
which took place in Washington in February 1942. By the time President
Ronald Reagan quoted from this sonnet in a tribute to the American
astronauts killed in the Challenger 7 space shuttle disaster in
January 1986, High Flight had become hugely popular among
fliers universally.
 My
second poem this week is by Robert Graves (1895 – 1985), an English
poet, novelist, critic, and classical scholar. He is now best
known for his historical novel I, Claudius; but he wrote
some 120 books on a wide variety of topics. He was severely wounded
in 1916 while serving as a British officer in World War I. His
experiences in the war deeply troubled him, and he wrote an autobiographical
book, Good-Bye To All That, on his wartime experiences,
which was published in 1929.
He wrote
three books of verse while in the army, and his Collected Poetry
appeared in 1948. During the period 1961 to 1966 he was Professor
of Poetry at the University of Oxford. The poem of his that I
have chosen is entitled Star-Talk,
and it dates from 1916 – 1917.
My last poem
is a brief extract from a much longer work. It is by Richard L.
Poss, who is an associate professor in the humanities program
at the University of Arizona in Tucson. It is the only real Martian
poem that I have; it is Martian
Landscape Poems. I found it on the web at www.newmars.com,
and part of his introduction reads:
“It seems
late to be contributing to the tradition of fantastic Martian
settings, rather than to the scientifically accurate ones. But
Mars is metaphor for a place far beyond the fourth planet. No
farther from the "truth" than were those of Burroughs,
Bradbury, or Lowell, it is an interior space, a soul's landscape,
but it is also Mars. All these settings speak of our ancient
kinship with the red planet, where humanity's next chapter will
be written. The dialectic between the emptiness of isolation
and the richness of solitude really should take place somewhere
beyond the Virgo cluster, but Mars will do for now.”
There are
68 short poems (or stanzas); and I have selected three, because
I think they convey the image of the inhospitable planet, and
embody the images in various recent fictional works that I find
most satisfying. I definitely recommend that you go to the site
above, and read the whole poem.
So there
you are! Live long and prosper!
And while
you’re at it, play The Planets Suite by Gustav Holst, and
listen particularly to Mars the Bringer of War. It sounds
like a march, more or less, but it’s in 5/4 time.
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