SOURCE: “The Temple of Nature,” in Erasmus Darwin, Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1963, pp. 120-32.

[In the following essay, King-Hele offers an assessment of The Temple of Nature, and states that the poem is evidence that Darwin, although a minor poet, deserves to hold a distinguished place among his eighteenth-century literary contemporaries.]

In the mud of the Cambrian main
          Did our earliest ancestor dive:
From a shapeless albuminous grain
          We mortals our being derive.

Grant Allen, Ballade of Evolution

Darwin's last poem, The Temple of Nature; or The Origin of Society, is largely devoted to stating his evolutionary view of life. He follows the progress of life from its origin as microscopic specks in primeval seas to its present culmination in a civilized human society. The ideas propounded and argued in Zoonomia are presented as if they were historical facts, though Darwin admits in his preface that his aim ‘is simply to amuse by bringing distinctly to the imagination the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature in the order, as the Author believes, in which the progressive course of time presented them’. If the author's beliefs had been wrong, the poem would be a mere curiosity to-day; but since he was usually right, The Temple of Nature acquires a prestige which prevents us judging it by its literary merit alone. It is a splendid achievement, at a time when biological science was by modern standards so primitive, to have described the origin and development of life in a way which is still largely acceptable. As literature, too, The Temple of Nature outshines The Botanic Garden, because the couplets are just as polished, and the chronological theme provides a coherent structure, which its predecessor lacked.

The Temple of Nature, like The Economy of Vegetation, is in four cantos, carries a heavy cargo of notes and runs to about 2,000 lines (1,928, to be exact). The first canto shows life's origin and its evolution from aquatic to land forms. The second deals with reproduction—asexual, hermaphroditic and finally sexual reproduction with all its advantages. The third canto traces the progress of the mind, from its origin as a mere meeting-place of nerves to its present complexity in man. In the fourth canto, ‘Of Good and Evil’, Darwin first describes the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, and then dwells on the pleasures of life and outlines his philosophy of organic happiness.

Canto I begins dauntingly, as Darwin invokes the generalized personifications, Nature, Love, Oblivion, etc., which preside over the poem, and describes the Temple of Nature, whose priestess, Urania, is to expound Nature's mysteries, ostensibly for the benefit of a virgin band of initiates. Fortunately the burden of allegory is relieved, both here and later in the poem, by lighter touches, including some lines to which time has given a comic twist. Every passenger on British Railways, knowing those gay posters of holiday resorts optimistically sunlit, will misread Darwin's

Bright scenes of bliss in trains suggested.

And on reaching the seaside what do we see? Darwin has the answer:

In slight undress recumbent Beauties rest.

Had Darwin really known the beaches would be beautified by girls in bikinis recumbent in sun-worship, he could scarcely have improved his wording; and we laugh at him for posthumously hitting such a trivial nail on the head. Comedy aside, the purpose of the first 200 lines is to set the scene for the rest of the poem, which consists mainly of monologues either by the Muse or by Urania, who is also called the Priestess of Nature, the Hierophant, and sometimes just ‘the Nymph’.

After the abstract introduction we come down not perhaps to brass tacks, but at least to microscopic specks, and learn how,

Nurs'd by warm sun-beams in primeval caves,
Organic Life began beneath the waves.

(I. 233-4)

It happened, Darwin surmises, by chance chemical actions, with the stimulus of sunlight to provide the energy.

Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth;
From Nature's womb the plant or insect swims,
And buds or breathes, with microscopic limbs.

(I. 247-50)

In a long note on spontaneous generation Darwin contends that many of the micro-organisms associated with disease are also spontaneously generated, an error which prevented him discovering the germ theory of disease, but does not invalidate his picture of the origin of life, since spontaneous generation is possible in a favourable sterile environment.¹ He believes that the primeval microscopic creatures gradually evolved into more complex forms, until they finally developed leaves, lungs or gills. The next step in evolution, as he sees it, is the growth of sensation, which ‘cannot exist till the nerves are united in the brain’:

Next the long nerves unite their silver train,
And young sensation permeates the brain.

(I. 269-70)

And after sensation come volition and association. There follows the brilliant summary of evolution,

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

(I. 295-302)

As land rises, he envisages the microscopic sea-creatures being cast ashore, and the larger ones going ashore to forage, with some gradually adapting themselves to a land existence ‘by innumerable successive reproductions for some thousands, or perhaps millions of ages’, after which they ‘may at length have produced many of the vegetable and animal inhabitants which now people the earth’ (I. 327, note). The transformation from gills to lungs he illustrates by references to the plant Trapa, which grows in water and air, to tadpoles and their transformations, to mosquitoes, to fishes which have both lungs and gills, and others. In a note on amphibians he discusses, admirably, how the heart mechanisms of quadrupeds change at birth, when they go from an aquatic to an air-breathing life—a process he also describes in verse:

Thus in the womb the nascent infant laves
Its natant form in the circumfluent waves;
With perforated heart unbreathing swims,
Awakes and stretches all its recent limbs;
With gills placental seeks the arterial flood,
And drinks pure ether from its Mother's blood.
Erewhile the landed Stranger bursts his way,
From the warm wave emerging into day;
Feels the chill blast, and piercing light, and tries
His tender lungs, and rolls his dazzled eyes.

(I. 389-98)

Rathke's discovery of gill slits in mammal embryos was not made until the 1820s²; so Darwin's mention of gills is yet another correct speculation. Then, as if to show he is at home with generalities as well as detail, he notes how amphibious embryos help to explain such myths as Venus rising from the sea.

Darwin also reiterates his view that the remains of lowly creatures, especially the shelly ones, both in the sea and on land, have built the huge calcareous rock deposits:

Now in vast shoals beneath the brineless tide,
On earth's firm crust testaceous tribes reside;
Age after age expands the peopled plain,
The tenants perish, but their cells remain;
Whence coral walls and sparry hills ascend
From pole to pole, and round the line extend.

(I. 315-20)

In a note on brineless tide he contends that the salt of the sea has gradually been accumulating as rivers bring down dissolved salts. Originally the sea was fresh, he says, a view which subsequently won wide acceptance.

In Canto II, which deals with reproduction, Darwin begins characteristically by touching on the fundamental questions. We do not know the reasons for ageing, he says, and speculates that the period of youth and vigour might be indefinitely extended. Also, he points out, ‘before mankind introduced civil society, old age did not exist … as all living creatures, as soon as they became too feeble to defend themselves, were slain and eaten by others …’ (II. 3, note). Ageing can at present only be conquered by reproduction, whose various forms he then considers. First in time came the asexual form:

The Reproductions of the living Ens
From sires to sons, unknown to sex, commence. …
Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,
And fathers live transmitted in their sons.

(II. 63-4, 107-8)

Examples are the ‘lone truffle’, polypus and tapeworm. The second stage, Darwin believed, was that of hermaphrodites, which had the qualities of both sexes and could impregnate themselves or each other. In support of this idea he notes that many vegetables are still hermaphroditic, and some animals, such as snails and worms; while even quadrupeds have residual hermaphroditic traits, such as the nipples on males. The third stage, reached by some plants and the majority of animals, was sexual reproduction, the masterpiece of nature, which allows the mixing of characters from both parents and is the key to evolutionary improvement … Cupid and Psyche therefore deserve the highest honour among the Greek gods:

Behold, he cries, Earth! Ocean! Air above,
And hail the Deities of Sexual Love!
All forms of Life shall this fond Pair delight,
And sex to sex the willing world unite. …

(II. 243-6)

They also merit our thanks because they

Fill Pleasure's chalice unalloy'd with pain.

As in The Loves of the Plants, Darwin extends the concept of sexual pleasure to vegetables:

Hence on green leaves the sexual Pleasures dwell …

(II. 263)

Darwin notes that some creatures utilize more than one of the methods of reproduction. The aphis, for example, goes through many fortnightly asexual generations in summer and then reverts to sexual reproduction in autumn, laying eggs for hatching next spring:

Unmarried Aphides prolific prove
For nine successions uninform'd of love;
New sexes next with softer passions spring,
Breathe the fond vow, and woo with quivering wing.

(II. 131-4)

He also has much to say about hereditary diseases. In asexual creatures these usually prove fatal:

The feeble births acquired diseases chase,
Till Death extinguish the degenerate race.

(II. 165-6)

Thus, ingrafted apple trees gradually lose vigour

          till, amended by connubial powers,
Rise seedling progenies from sexual flowers.

(II. 175-6)

Hereditary diseases are mitigated but not eliminated by sexual reproduction. In man, gout, insanity and consumption are to some extent hereditary, he thinks, but such disease is less likely with ‘marriages … into different families than … into the same family’. He ends his long note on hereditary diseases with the acute observation: ‘As many families become gradually extinct by hereditary diseases, as by scrofula, consumption, epilepsy, mania, it is often hazardous to marry an heiress, as she is not unfrequently the last of a diseased family’. (Additional Note XI.) This injunction against marrying heiresses was reformulated in a less satisfactory form, and confirmed statistically, by Sir Francis Galton in his book Hereditary Genius.³ It seems to have been a characteristic of Darwin's grandsons that from time to time they unconsciously reproduced and verified some of his bright ideas.

Although sexual reproduction is so much superior to other forms, the pleasure it gives has a darker side, in the rivalry between males. Darwin versifies the paragraph from Zoonomia about the battles among cocks, boars and stags …, and cites Helen of Troy too in support of his thesis. He then offers some rather comic pictures of connubial bliss in animals:

The Lion-King forgets his savage pride,
And courts with playful paws his tawny bride;
The listening Tiger hears with kindling flame
The love-lorn night-call of his brinded dame.
Despotic Love dissolves the bestial war. …

(II. 357-61)

All birds, beasts, insects, fish and plants then combine to

hail The Deities of Sexual Love.

In the third canto, on the progress of the mind, Darwin reviews the achievements of man. Sometimes he covers the same ground as in The Economy of Vegetation or Zoonomia, and we need not follow him, except to note how well he versifies the new discoveries in chemistry and electricity. For example, there is his pleasing picture of the atmosphere and oceans:

Or mark how Oxygen with Azote-Gas
Plays round the globe in one aërial mass,
Or fused with Hydrogen in ceaseless flow
Forms the wide waves, which foam and roll below.

(III. 13-16)

The mind progresses, Darwin believes, by a process of imitation. Art begins with the imitation of Nature, an imitation which the mind slightly modifies. His theory seems to be that art is about 95 per cent imitation and 5 per cent inspiration, with the inspiration itself arising as a kind of bonus from assiduous imitation. Language began, he believes, with the ‘dumb gestures’ of miming, which are imitations of real movements, and, though man now communicates by ‘quick concussions of elastic air’, language is still learnt by imitation. Also, if animals or men are to form coherent social groups, they must observe certain customs, which can be regarded as imitation par excellence. Darwin covers all these topics and many more—perception, beauty, man's advantage in possessing hands, the organization of the insect world, the struggle for existence, sublime scenery and, finally, sympathy, that seraph who ‘charms the world with universal love’.

One of his most detailed discourses is on language. In one long and pedantic note he propounds a theory of language, arguing that words fall into four classes: conjunctions and prepositions; nouns; adjectives, adverbs, etc.; and verbs. In another and more interesting note, he analyses articulate sound. He explains the scientific basis of sound, deplores the inadequacy of the alphabet and then lists and discusses the thirty-one sounds into which English speech can, he thinks, be subdivided. It is a convincing and thorough analysis, and gives the lie to those who accuse him of always being speculative and sketchy. He was the more confident of his ground because he had as a student been proficient in Gurney's system of shorthand—indeed some specimens of his shorthand appeared in Gurney's manual on the subject⁴—and he later tried to improve the system and also constructed a speaking-machine …. Here we need only note that this topic shows Darwin at his best, with a practicable and ingenious invention to support a well-thought-out and novel theory.

The fourth canto, on ‘Good and Evil’, begins with the vivid picture of the struggle for existence, already noticed in Chapter V. After the verses on animals, … he turns to insects:

The wing'd Ichneumon for her embryon young
Gores with sharp horn the caterpillar throng.
The cruel larva mines its silky course,
And tears the vitals of its fostering nurse.

(IV. 33-6)

Then, … he looks at the sea:

In ocean's pearly haunts, the waves beneath
Sits the grim monarch of insatiate Death;
The shark rapacious with descending blow
Darts on the scaly brood, that swims below …

(IV. 55-8)

The world, then, is a mere slaughter-house. Man suffers as much as any—perhaps more, because of artificial ills like slavery, war, religious mania, alcohol and avarice:

Here ragged Avarice guards with bolted door
His useless treasures from the starving poor;
Loads the lorn hours with misery and care,
And lives a beggar to enrich his heir.

(IV. 97-100)

Is there nothing to hear, then, but ‘one universal groan’?

Ah where can Sympathy reflecting find
One bright idea to console the mind?

(IV. 131-2)

Darwin, through his spokeswoman the Hierophant, replies that Good and Evil are, for man, nicely balanced. On the side of Good is, first, the very joy of living, the tingling of the blood in the veins. Next come the delights of Nature—flowers, streams, varied landscapes—the pleasures of Love, and the enjoyments of music, painting and all the imaginative arts. Then there are the satisfactions of patriotism and philanthropy, and the triumphs of science, from Newton's sublime concepts to the practical grasp of Archimedes or inventions like the steam engine. Printing has speeded the advance of knowledge, and the press must remain free, to save

The tree of knowledge from the axe of power.

Technology exists to serve Man, and Darwin foresees some of its future achievements, including skyscrapers, piped water—and traffic jams:

Bid raised in air the ponderous structure stand,
Or pour obedient rivers through the land;
With cars unnumber'd crowd the living streets,
Or people oceans with triumphant fleets.

(IV. 315-8)

At the end, however, Darwin discards his rose-tinted spectacles and reverts to the survival of the fittest. A single aphis could have a progeny of over 2 billion in the course of its ten generations in summer, ‘ten thousand seeds each pregnant poppy sheds’, the herring spawns profusely—

All these, increasing by successive birth,
Would each o'erpeople ocean, air, and earth.
So human progenies, if unrestrain'd,
By climate friended, and by food sustain'd,
O'er seas and soils, prolific hordes! would spread
Erelong, and deluge their terraqueous bed;
But war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth,
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth.

(IV. 367-74)

But, since ‘every pore of Nature teems with Life’, new organisms soon spring up to counterbalance the death of ‘a Monarch or a mushroom’, as the fable of the Phoenix implies. So Darwin leads up to his philosophy of organic happiness …. ‘The sum total of the happiness of organized nature is probably increased rather than diminished, when one large old animal dies, and is converted into many thousand young ones’ (IV. 410, note). He emphasizes too

                                                  how restless atoms pass
From life to life, a transmigrating mass;

(IV. 419-20)

to-day they may be in poisonous henbane, and to-morrow in a Beauty's smile. After explaining that rocks are often ‘mighty monuments of past delight’, he concludes:

Shout round the globe, how Reproduction strives
With vanquish'd Death,—and Happiness survives;
How Life increasing peoples every clime,
And young renascent Nature conquers Time.

(IV. 451-4)

The Muse and the attendant nymphs are astonished at this exposition, as well they might be, and recover their poise by moving in procession down ‘leaf-wove avenues’ and through brazen gates to the Temple of Nature. There they sing hymns in honour of the evolutionary process, and Urania

Lifts her ecstatic eyes to Truth Divine

2

How are we to judge Darwin as a poet from his performance in The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature? Which is nearer the mark, Horace Walpole's extravagant praise, or the world's subsequent contempt?

Historically, Darwin was in an unfortunate position as a poet, being the last of a line which deserved to be superseded, and was. For him poetry was little more than prettified prose, facts robed in finery. He had no inkling that his view would so soon be ousted by the Romantic ideal of poetry as the true voice of feeling. In the last hundred years poetry has retreated still further from the factual and actual, and even from the fictional, with the decline of narrative verse. Darwin's verse takes its origin not from emotion spontaneously recollected in tranquillity, but from scientific facts and theories purposefully worked into neat couplets. ‘Nothing is done in passion and power. … Every line is as elaborately polished and sharpened as a lancet.’⁵ To-day, bound as we still are by the Romantic concept of the poet, we cannot possibly regard Darwin as a great poet.

Despite these strictures, it seems to me that Darwin deserves a distinguished place among minor poets, because he was a first-class verse-technician, almost the equal of Pope, and because of his unique success in popularizing science by incorporating it imaginatively in verse. His skill in versification was acclaimed in the 1790s and has never been denied, although the demands of the rhyming sometimes lead him into pompously vapid statements about abstractions, which now seem ludicrous or distasteful. To his skill in verse-making he added a capacity for coining the memorable phrase. One of his severest Victorian critics, G. L. Craik, had to admit that ‘no writer has surpassed him in the luminous representation of visible objects in verse’.⁵ He was both original and successful in weaving scientific discoveries and theories into poetry, thereby giving ‘to the British Parnassus a wider extent than it possessed in Greece’,⁶ in Anna Seward's curious phrase. All subsequent attempts to widen the British Parnassus in this way have failed (excluding Alfred Noyes's saga of the history of science, The Torch-Bearers, which is in a different category). So Anna Seward may have been right in thinking that The Botanic Garden ‘will probably never have an equal in its particular class’.⁶ Darwin's success in weaving natural history into poetry was more than mere virtuosity, however: it showed real imaginative grasp. For this feat Darwin has recently been earning some long-overdue recognition from literary critics, particularly from Bernard Blackstone in The Consecrated Urn, and from Elizabeth Sewell who, in The Orphic Voice, treats him on almost equal terms with Bacon, Goethe and Wordsworth, and calls The Temple of Nature ‘a noble poem’.⁷

To sum up, it is fair to say that Darwin's verse oscillates between the brilliant (when his great skill in versification chimes in with his subject) and the ludicrous, when a conclusive-sounding couplet says nothing worth saying. At its best his verse is original and unique for incorporating scientific facts and theories in a harmonious and telling manner, and it was also unique as the only best-selling scientific poem in English. For these achievements he deserves to stand above those minor poets who, while sharing with him a facility for verse, have no distinctive vein of their own.

Notes

1. See A. I. Oparin, Life: Its Nature, Origin and Development (1961), p. 62.

2. See C. Singer, History of Biology, p. 477.

3. F. Galton, Hereditary Genius (Watts, 1950), pp. 124-33.

4. P. C. Ritterbush, Review of English Studies, XIII, 158-60 (1962).

5. G. L. Craik, History of English Literature, (3rd ed., 1866), II. 382-3.

6. Seward, p. 178.

7. E. Sewell, The Orphic Voice, p. 244. The Temple of Nature is also the subject of a study by Irwin Primer, to be published in Journ. Hist. Ideas in 1964. A Russian translation of The Temple of Nature was published by the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1954. See C. A. Hoare, Annals of Science, 11, 255-6 (1955).

Works Cited

Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin. Johnson, 1804.

Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice. Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 1960.

Charles Singer, A History of Biology. 3rd ed., Abelard-Schuman, 1959.