Sonnet — To Science
Sonnet — To Science (German: Sonett - An der Wissenschaft ) is a sonnet by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe . It was first published untitled by him in 1829 in his collection of poems Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems . The simple title Sonnet was initially used for various reprints in magazines and newspapers , until Poe gave the text its final title Sonnet - To Science in his last volume of poetry, The Raven and Other Poems .
Poe uses Shakespeare's sonnet form to thematize the contrast between poetry and science . In this text, natural science is for him the vulture who de-divines nature, whose wings are “dull realities”, while the poet, indirectly compared to Icarus , goes on a treasure hunt with “undaunted wing” (“fearless wing”) the “jeweled skies” (“jeweled skies”). Diana , the Hamadryads and the Naiads and an elf "from the green grass" are named as examples of expelled deities who endowed nature with poetry, but also the "summer dream beneath the tamarind tree" (" Summer dream under the tamarind tree ”) of the lyrical self .
Poe's sonnet reflects Lamia , a narrative poem by John Keats from 1819 in which "all magic escapes" when touched by a "cold philosophy" that "cuts the wings" of angels.
Poe used a variant of this sonnet as the motto for his 1841 short story The Island of the Fay .
In later poems, Poe no longer placed poetry and natural science as irreconcilably opposed to one another as in this sonnet, which corresponded to the romantic mainstream , but tried to achieve their reconciliation particularly impressively in his cosmological essay Heureka of 1848, which he called prose-poem .
Web links
- Original text on the website of the Poetry Foundation, there based on The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (1946) .
- Sonnet to science in the Gutenberg-DE project , German translation by Hedwig Lachmann .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Thomas Ollive Mabbott (and EA Poe): Sonnet - To Science . In: The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Vol. I: Poems . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1969, p. 90-92 . , according to [1]
- ^ Sarojini Henry: The encounter of faith and science in inter-religious dialogue. Indian Institute of Science and Religion, Delhi 2005, ISBN 81-7214-878-X , pp. 181-182 ( books.google.de )
- ^ Kuno Schuhmann in Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven. Poems & essays. Bargfeld and Zurich 1994, p. 414.