“STEM verse: historic,
Cross-disciplinary, as
Intriguing efforts will
Semaphores yield.
Enduring case:
Coleridge, lectures attending
From Davy, to find
‘Stock of metaphors’ filled.”
The 6 April 2024 Twitter poem celebrated a famous interdisciplinary intersection of science and poetry, via the story of Humphry Davy and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
“STEM verse: historic, /
Cross-disciplinary, as /
Intriguing efforts will /
Semaphores yield.”
This near-double-dactylic verse built on the previous poem; the discussion of constructive interference as a metaphor for rewarding collaborative teaching reminded me of another interdisciplinary endeavor.
As I’ve written about here before, Humphry Davy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth were contemporaries, working in the areas of chemistry and poetry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Davy isolated multiple elements and invented an arc lamp, among many other scientific achievements; notably, he often gave public lectures on insights, presenting scientific material to a general audience. Coleridge and Wordsworth are two of the names most associated with the Romantic era, the beginning of which movement is often traced to the 1798 publication of their Lyrical Ballads. (A fascinating sidenote in Davy’s biography is that he helped to facilitate the editing and publishing process for the second edition of this work in 1800, among other collaborative efforts.) The cross-disciplinary conversations among Davy, Coleridge, and Wordsworth yielded rewarding insights and ideas, potentially viewed as signals across traditional disciplinary gaps: “semaphores,” figuratively.
“Enduring case: /
Coleridge, lectures attending /
From Davy, to find /
‘Stock of metaphors’ filled.”
This poem celebrated the most famous quote that I am aware of in terms of the collaboration itself: Coleridge’s comment that he attended Davy’s public lectures on chemistry to build up his “stock of metaphors.”
The overlap of science and literature is complex and fascinating, and these blog entries are glancing at best. However, whenever I do use one of my own “stock of metaphors,” accumulated now over the past fifteen years of teaching (unbelievable!), this famous quote inevitably comes to mind.
Chemphasis 