by
From Darwin's Ark
Illustrations by Rudy Pozzatti
Indiana University Press, 1984
© 1984 by Philip Appleman.
Used with permission.
(
Some people hold the world
in their fingertips, and
are part of what they hold.
The Beagle set sail
to easy summer - five years on sea
and land the watchful man
from Cambridge put
his fingers on a universe
of cuttlefish, sea-slugs, condors,
the ancient monsters' bones,
Megatherium, Mastodon: all
fixed forever in immutable forms, creatures
of a benign Intelligence.
It was written.
But the young man put his fingers on
the pulse of rivers, coral reefs,
pampas and mountains,
the flotsam of earthquakes - and
on futures of learning, from
pigeons' plumage, the beaks of finches, bones
of rabbits and ducks - decades
of learning,
dissecting ten thousand
barnacles - pondering:
"If we choose to let
conjecture run wild, then animals -
our fellow brethren in pain,
disease, death, suffering, and famine -
they may partake from our origin
in one common ancestor:
we may be all
netted together."
The Beagle labored on: in the winter
of Cape Horn,
twenty-three days of beating
against the icy bluster
came to broken boats
and spoiled collections.
The good ship rode to shelter -
and there on a rocky point
of Tierra del Fuego, naked
in snow, a mother
suckled her child
("whilst the sleet fell and thawed
on her naked bosom, and on the skin
of her naked baby") - there, in a little band,
stood
"man in his primitive wildness,"
ringed by the dark beech forest:
"As they threw their arms wildly
around their heads,
their long hair streaming,
they seemed the troubled spirits
of another world."
There
in the Bay of Good Success,
Charles Darwin, on the foredeck of the Beagle,
our future in his freezing fingertips,
stared into the faces
of our past.
Philip Appleman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, where he was a founding editor of Victorian Studies. He is the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Darwin's works, and author of several volumes of poetry and fiction.
Rudy Pozzatti is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts at Indiana University. His work has won numerous prizes and awards, and can be seen in major museum collections throughout the world. Since his retirement in 1991, he has been involved in a number of independent projects, and is currently at work on a collection of 125 color prints commissioned by the Rochester Print Society of New York.