by A. S. Byatt
The grassy knoll
Shivers in His embrace
His muscles—roll
About—about—His Face
Smiles hot and gold
Over the small hill’s brow
And every fold
Contracts and stiffens—now
He gathers strength
His glistering length
Grips, grips: the stones
Cry out like bones
Constricted—earth—in pain
Cries out—again—
He grips and smiles—
My very dear,
I write in haste—I fear your answer—I know not whether to depart or no—I will stay, for you—unless this small chance you spoke of prove a true possibility. Yet how may that be? How could you satisfactorily explain such a step? How can I not nevertheless hope?
I do not wish to do irreparable damage to your life. I have so much rational understanding left to me, as to beg you—against my own desires, my own hope, my own true love—to think before and after. If by any kind of ingenuity it may be done satisfactorily so that you may afterwards live as you wish—well then—if it may—this is not matter for writing. I shall be in the Church at noon tomorrow.
I send my love now and always.
Dear Sir,
It is done. BY FIAT. I spoke Thunder—and said—so it shall be—and there will be no questions now—or ever—and to this absolute Proposition I have—like all Tyrants—meek acquiescence.
No more Harm can be done by this than has already been done—not by your will—though a little by mine—for I was (and am) angry.
11
SWAMMERDAM
Bend nearer, Brother, if you please. I fear
I trouble you. It will not be for long.
I thank you now, before my voice, or eyes,
Or weak wit fail, that you have sat with me
Here in this bare white cell, with the domed roof
As chalky-plain as any egg’s inside.
I shall be hatched tonight. Into what clear
And empty space of quiet, she best knows,
The holy anchoress of Germany
Who charged you with my care, and speaks to God
For my poor soul, my small soul, briefly housed
In this shrunk shelly membrane that He sees,
Who holds, like any smiling Boy, this shell
In his bright palm, and with His instrument
Of Grace, pricks in his path, for infinite Light
To enter through his pinhole, and seek out
What must be sucked to him, an inchoate slop
Or embryonic Angel’s fledgling wings.
I have not much to leave. Once I had much,
Or thought it much, but men thought otherwise.
Well-nigh three thousand winged or creeping things
Lively in death, injected by my Art,
Lovingly entered, opened and displayed—
The types of Nature’s Bible, ranged in ranks
To show the secrets of her cunning hand.
No matter now. Write—if you please—I leave
My manuscripts and pens to my sole friend,
The Frenchman, the incomparable Thévenot,
Who values, like a true philosopher
The findings of a once courageous mind.
He should have had my microscopes and screws—
The copper helper with his rigid arms
We called Homunculus, who gripped the lens
Steadier than human hands, and offered up
Fragments of gauze, or drops of ichor, to
The piercing eyes of Men, who dared to probe
Secrets beyond their frame’s unaided scope.
But these are gone, to buy the bread and milk
This curdled stomach can no more ingest.
I must die in his debt. He is my friend
And will forgive me. Write that hope. Then write
For her, for Antoinette de Bourignon
(Who spoke to me, when I despaired, of God’s
Timeless and spaceless point of Infinite Love)
That, trusting her and Him, I turn my face
To the bare wall, and leave this world of things
For the No-thing she shewed me, when I came
Halting to Germany, to seek her out.
Now sign it, Swammerdam, and write the date,
March, 1680, and then write my age
His forty-third year. His small time’s end. His time—
Who saw Infinity through countless cracks
In the blank skin of things, and died of it.
Think you, a man’s life grows a certain shape
As out of ant’s egg antworm must proceed
And out of antworm wrapped in bands must come
The monstrous female or the winged drone
Or hurrying worker, each in its degree?
I am a small man, closed in a small space,
Expert in smallness, in the smallest things,
The inconsiderable and overlooked,
The curious and the ephemeral.
I like your small cell, Brother. Poverty,
Whiteness, a window, water, and your hand
Steadying the beaker at my cracking lips.
Thank you. It is enough.
Where I was born
Was a small space too, not like this, not bare,
A brilliant dusty hutch of mysteries,
A cabinet of curiosities.
What did my eyes first light on? There was scarce
Space for a crib between the treasure-chests,
The subtle-stoppered jars and hanging silks,
Feathers and bones and stones and empty gourds
Heaped pêle-mêle o’er the tables and the chairs.
A tray of moonstones spilled into a bowl
Of squat stone scarabs and small painted eyes
Of alien godlings winked from dusty shelves.
A mermaid swam in a hermetic jar
With bony fingers scraping her glass walls
And stiff hair streaming from her shrunken head.
Her dry brown breasts were like mahogany,
Her nether parts, coiled and confined, were dull,
Like ancient varnish, but her teeth were white.
And there was too a cockatrice’s egg,
An ivory-coloured sphere, or almost sphere,
That balanced on a Roman drinking-cup
Jostling a mummy-cat, still wrapped around
With pitch-dark bandages from head to foot,
Sand-dried, but not unlike the swaddling-bands
My infant limbs were held in, I assume.
And your hands, will they? presently will fold
This husk here in its shroud and close my eyes,
Weakened by so much straining over motes
And specks of living matter, eyes that oped
In innocent lustre on that teasing heap
Of prizes reaped round the terrestrial globe
By resolute captains of the proud Dutch ships
That slip their anchors here in Amsterdam,
Sail out of mist and squalls, ride with the wind
To burning lands beneath a copper sun
Or never-melted mountains of green ice
Or hot dark secret places in the steam
Of equatorial forests, where the sun
Strikes far above the canopy, where men
And other creatures never see her light
Save as a casual winking lance that runs
A silver shaft between green dark and dark.
I had a project, as a tiny boy
To make a catalogue of all this pelf,
Range it, create an order, render it,
You might say, human-sized, by typing it
According to the use we made of it
Or meanings we saw in it. I would part
Medicine from myth, for instance, amulets
(Pure superstition) from the minerals—
&
nbsp; Rose-quartz, quicksilver, we could grind to heal
Agues or tropic fever. Living things
Should have their own affined taxonomy,
Insect with insect, dusty bird with bird,
And all the eggs, from monstrous ostrich-globe
To chains of soft-shelled snakes’ eggs, catalogued,
Measured with calipers and well set out
Gainst taffeta curtains, in curved wooden cups.
My father had a pothecary’s shop
And seemed well-pleased at first to have a son
With such precocious yearnings of the mind.
He was ambitious for me. In his thoughts
He saw me doing human good, admired
By men, humble in God’s eyes, eloquent
For truth and justice. When he saw that I
Was not the lawyer-son his hopes embraced
He fixed on a physician. “Who can mend
Man’s ailing frame, succours his soul too,” said
My father, a devout and worldly man,
“And keeps himself in bread and meat and wine.
Since fallen man must ail, the doctor’s care
Is ever-wanted, this side of the grave.”
But I had other leanings. Did they come
From scrupulous intellect, or glamorous spell
Cast by my infant nursery’s denizens?
It seemed to me that true anatomy
Began not in the human heart and hands
But in the simpler tissues, primal forms,
Of tiny things that crept or coiled or flew.
The clue to life lay in the blind white worm
That eats away the complex flesh of men,
Is eaten by the farmyard bird who makes
A succulent dinner for another man
And so completes the circle. Life is One
I thought, and rational anatomy
Begins at the foot o’ the ladder, on the rung
Nearest the fertile heat of Mother Earth.
Was it for that, or was it that my Soul
Had been possessed, in that dark Cabinet
By the black spider, big as a man’s fist,
Tangible demon, in her sooty hair,
Or by the coal-black Moths of Barbary
Pierced through their frail dark wings, and crucified
With pins, for our amusement?
These were strange
And yet were forms of life, as I was too
(With a soul superadded, understood)
And kin to me, or so I thought, when young.
For all seemed fashioned from the self-same stuff,
Mythic gold yolk and glassy albumen
Of ancient Egypt’s fabled Mundane Egg,
Laid in the Void by sable-plumaged Night.
From which sprang Eros, all in feathered light
Who fecundated Chaos, wherein formed
Germens of all that lives and moves on Earth.
The Orphic fables in their riddling wit
Pointed us there, perhaps, towards a truth.
I sought to know the origins of life.
I thought it lawful knowledge. Did not God
Who made my hands and eyes, lend me the skill
To make my patient copper mannikin
Who held the lenses, variously curved
Steady above the living particles
I learned to scry and then to magnify
Successively in an expanding scale
Of diminution or of magnitude,
Until I saw successive plans and links
Of dizzying order and complexity?
I could anatomise a mayfly’s eye,
Could so arrange the cornea of a gnat
That I could peer through that at New Church Tower,
And see it upside down and multiplied,
Like many pinpoints, where no Angels danced.
A moth’s wing scaly like a coat of mail,
The sharp hooked claws upon the legs of flies—
I saw a new world in this world of ours—
A world of miracle, a world of truth
Monstrous and swarming with unguessed-at life.
That glass of water you hold to my lips,
Had I my lenses, would reveal to us
Not limpid clarity as we suppose—
Pure water—but a seething, striving horde
Of animalcules lashing dragon-tails