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| A MEDITATION ON DISCOVERY
JULY 14, 1997TRANSCRIPT |
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Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky reads a passage from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene dealing with the human desire for discovery.
JIM LEHRER: Now we look at Mars and the thrill of discovery. U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky gives us a text.
ROBERT PINSKY, Poet Laureate: Discovery is a feeling, as well as a fact. It's a feeling that people who work here at the Observatory of Boston's Museum of Science can see in a kid's face when the kid looks in the telescope and sees the rings of Saturn. It's a feeling many of us have had as we see the pictures from Mars and follow the news from Mars.
Looking for that feeling somewhere in poetry, I turned to the English 16th century, which was a period where the Europeans were writing poems at the time of great discovery. I'm going to read to you from Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queen," part of the poem or prelude poem to Book II. In this passage, Spenser meditates on discovery, and he even, in a way, predicts some of our discoveries:
But let that man with better sence advize,
That of the world least part to us is red:
And dayly how through hardy enterprize,
Many great Regions are discovered,
Which to late age were never mentioned.
Who ever heard of th'Indian Peru?
Or who in venturous vessell measured
The Amazon huge river now found trew?
Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?Yet all these were, when no man did them know;
Yet have from wisest ages hidden beene:
And later times things more unknowne shall show.
Why then should witlesse man so much misweene
That nothing is, but that which he hath seene?
What if within the Moones faire shining spheare?
What if in every other starre unseene
Of other worldes he happily should heare?
He wonder would much more: yet such to some appeare.
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