More Biology Perspectives: Poetry Extras (10ths esp!)

These poems should give you more to think about!!

(and if you want some bonus points toward your grades this 2nd term, 10th graders, can be for you to choose your favorite of these three to learn and recite!)

Robert Frost (1874-1963) Design (1936)

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth— Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth— A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?— If design govern in a thing so small.

Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849)

To Science (1829)

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise? Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

The microbe is so very small You cannot make him out at all. But many sanguine people hope To see him down a microscope. His jointed tongue that lies beneath A hundred curious rows of teeth; His seven tufted tail with lots Of lovely pink and purple spots On each of which a pattern stands, Composed of forty seperate bands; His eyebrows of a tender green; All these have never yet been seen - But Scientists, who ought to know, Assure us they must be so ... Oh! let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about! -- Hilaire Belloc in "More Beasts for Worse Children" (1897), 47-48