New Atlantis – Francis Bacon

Bacon’s New Atlantis is an utopic text that clearly defines the role of science in society, showing how beneficial it would be to have it center in society’s concerns and efforts.

In terms of plot, the story starts with a ship that gets lost in a tempest, and fearing for their own safety and already possessing a quantity of sick people, they find the land of Bensalem. This land is inhabited by a society that is insulated, but inhabited by a variety of peoples from previous centuries of exploration. The island, now forgotten, is home to a college called Salomon’s House, which his dedicated to the study and classification of all of God’s works of nature. The rest of the text is pretty much a description of the society, which welcomes strangers but choses to only leave every 12 years to get the most recent scientific inventions and news.

There are interesting markers in here for classification, breeding, propagation of the species, enhancing and transmuting species, mining, and political/religious ramifications.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Sonnet 15

A Shakesperian sonnet, three quatrains and a couplet. This poem focuses on time’s effects on all things of nature, but particularly on his love. Everything fades under time, but Shakespeare creates immortality for his love in his poems. Even though everything in the world seems to want to take away his love’s beauty, Shakespeare knows he can keep her beauty in his mind and for all of perpetuity by writing it down, thus becoming more powerful than time or nature.

Sonnet 18

Similarly with 15, this poem focuses on how to keep his love’s beauty alive by writing about it. The interesting things I found about both 15 and 18 are the allusions to nature, which both use “grafting” as a metaphor. In 15, Shakespeare “engrafts” his love with his poem, allowing a new part of her (the poetic part) to grow from the old. In 18, it’s similar, only here his love is grafted to time itself through his poetry and has thus become immortal.

Sonnet 25

This sonnet is about fame and how it can be dangerous to use others, “stars,” to become famous because they can use their own power to demolish you. For Shakespeare, its much safer to have no power or influence, but to be relatively safe to make your own way in the world rather than use others to gain fame.

Sonnet 60

This poem is about how fast time moves and that life is over before you know it. There’s metaphor on metaphor in this poem, much of which has to do with the earth and Jesus.

Sonnet 97

A seasonal poem, Shakespeare feels as though its winter even though it’s summer because his love is absent from him. Even though autumn has come and the fruits of man’s labor have all come up, he cannot enjoy them because his love is gone. Nature itself seems to be in mourning, as the birds go quiet because she’s absent, and if they do sing, its because winter is on its way.

Sonnet 147

Shakespeare’s body is equated with the Earth, and his soul is the inhabitant. He wants to know why his soul, who spends so brief a time in his body, lingers and puts on such a show when heaven is waiting. Instead of spending all this time/money on food/eating which the worms will only eat anyway, he wants to instead start spending time preparing for divinity. Once he’s dead, death itself will be dead, and then he won’t have to fear dying.

Margaret Cavendish – “A World in an Earring”

This poem uses extended metaphors to get across the message that there may be many worlds beyond the one that we’re on, and, beyond that, that what is not visible to the human eye or tools of knowledge cannot be assumed. Cavendish explores the idea that the world, with its sun, planets, and surrounding stars, is contained within an earring on a woman’s ear. This world contains everything our world does, fish, poles, gardens, plagues, cities, life and death, etc. But all of these events pass the wearer of the earring by and she remains oblivious. The wearer of the earring is not the creator, and heaven and “Elysium” still exist, which indicates that there is a God, but that our understanding of the universe is focused too narrowly.

This poem speaks to gender issues and has a quasi-feminist argument, although its more of a matriarchal powertrip than a leveling equality that true feminism would have.

Some of the things that interest me are her mentioning diamonds, golden mines, spices, earthquakes, and plagues as they relate to my attempt at locating an ecocritical argument in the 17^th century.