Competing Visions

    
     Sickness was everywhere, so the university shut down and the student went home. He ended up staying there for two years. When he went back to school, he had done a lot of work in the fields of optics, calculus, and the law of gravitation -- which is to say, he had invented those fields, for the student was Isaac Newton.

"So what did YOU get done during quarantine?"

    
     Eventually Newton went public with his various theories and upended everybody's conception of the universe. He became so revered that the English government gave him the Royal Mint to run. After Newton died he was buried with honors at Westminster Abbey, where the bones of literary Brits from Chaucer to Ted Hughes are interred.
     One poet not buried at Westminster Abbey -- though there is a bust in his honor now -- is William Blake, who stood out by loathing Newton's work, more than a century after it had been accepted. Blake was a mystic who did not like to see the universe explained with math and not ecstatic visions. "Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death," Blake wrote. And since he was a great artist as well as a great poet, Blake made this famous image of Newton.

     Blake meant this to be a mocking portrait -- Newton squatting naked on a gross rock, stupidly obsessed with his compass -- but the world doesn't seem to have gotten the memo. A statue based on this image now honors Newton near the British Library.

     So Blake wasn't able to win his one-sided feud with the author of the Principia, neither in life nor after it.  Still, after his own death Blake grew in stature as a literary figure, to the point where one of his poems was adapted into the unofficial national anthem. Score one for art against science: Newton's laws of motion may be true, but you can't really sing along with them.

Jerusalem

                                                  And did those feet in ancient time

                                                  Walk upon Englands mountains green:

                                                  And was the holy Lamb of God,

                                                  On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

 

                                                  And did the Countenance Divine,

                                                  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

                                                 And was Jerusalem builded here,

                                                 Among these dark Satanic Mills?

      

                                                 Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

                                                 Bring me my arrows of desire:

                                                 Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

                                                 Bring me my Chariot of fire!

 

                                                 I will not cease from Mental Fight,

                                                Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

                                                Till we have built Jerusalem,

                                                In Englands green & pleasant Land.