ISBN: 9781846941351. reviews He collected the facts, came to the inescapable conclusions, changed our world view forever. The BBC’s Darwin season has probably provided most of us with an outline of his life. We have seen the Galapagos Islands, the Darwin home at Down House. But it has taken a poet to bring that life to life.
No-one could be better equipped than Ruth Padel.
Not only is she an outstanding poet and Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter, but is a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London and a member of the Royal Geographical and the Bombay Natural History Societies. She has also travelled the world, including locations where Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace gathered their data. She knows her stuff. An added, and major, advantage was her ancestor’s own wonderfully evocative writing.
The poems are printed with marginal notes giving dates and background facts, but the living nerves are in the poetry. It incorporates the written words of Darwin and his family and associates, from the many memoirs and letters available. Indeed, some poems are entirely quotations, the words barely tweaked to fit the accommodating simplicity of free verse. So how has Padel worked her magic? She has her ancestor’s eye for details and her poet’s skill at presenting them.
For instance: ‘A land iguana! One saffron/ leathery elbow, powdery as lichen, sticking out/ like a man doing press-ups while leering at the sand.’ But there is more: a strong power of conveying emotion. So much delight, grief, fear, doubt; so much illness in a suffering family. It makes a moving and enthralling story. We follow Darwin’s youth, as a nonsporty boy obsessed with natural history collecting; his passion for guns and shooting; his abortive attempts to read medicine at Edinburgh and then divinity at Cambridge. We are aware how early he began to deplore his ugliness (remaining conscious of it in later life). Then comes the voyage. Darwin’s excitement and delight in all he finds of geology, flora and fauna is contrasted with his revulsion as he encounters the cruelties of slavery. Later, we follow his loves and losses, his wrestling with religious faith.
Darwin’s studies at Cambridge were intended as a prelude to being a gentleman clergyman. So he had studied theology, he had read Paley. Was there an ultimate Designer? Even before his marriage Darwin was already privately taking leave of God, so marriage with his devout cousin Emma Wedgwood presented them both with an intractable and lifelong heartache.
He can feel his doubt. It flows/ at the rate of lava, ten hours for every inch... He wants, so much, to believe as she desires/ (The night is squashing him like magma.)
They had ten children, three of whom died. All Emma’s confinements were terrible. As Padel describes the first the reader winces. The pain is ‘a battering ram, a guillotine inside’. He listens, ‘waiting, like a hermit on a pole/ forty nights in bare/ desert. The cries...’ In this book we relive Charles’ recurrent illnesses (almost certainly from the infection contracted in South America). ‘The microbe hunters haven’t got going yet. (Louis Pasteur is thirteen.)’, the poet reminds us. Darwin joyfully studied his beloved children’s development just as he would any creature’s, but the confirmation of his theories in their inheritance of his disease and their vulnerability as children of first cousins only reinforced the misery of seeing them suffer.
Towards the end we are privy to Wallace’s suffering too, as he contracts malaria. ‘The heat is huge/ as if he had the sun in bed with him... a smelly rag of a man on a bed of straw and parasites.’ Yet both men retained their passionate delight in discovering, collecting, contemplating. ‘Banana leaves/ shit-speckled as with sweet pea/ petals, or with snow, by roosting birds.’ ‘When the sickness is worst/ he watches a tendril/ spiral clockwise into light.’ The poems throb with joy as well as pain. 'We stand in awe before the mystery of life,' Padel quotes from the ancestor who elucidated so much of that mystery. This book is a major achievement. I commend it to you.
AnneAshworth’s publications include theVerbTo Be is Everywhere Irregular (poetry) and The Oblique Light:Poetry and Peak Experience (poetry and prose). She is a member of SOF.
Anne Ashworth reviews Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel Chatto & Windus (London 2009). Hbk. 141 pages. £12.99. ISBN: 9780701183851. reviews To Carry the Child John Horder reflects on the first Stevie Smith Roadshow, held in the Magdala Pub, Hampstead on January 14th 2009.
Reviewing Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel, Chatto & Windus (London 2009). Hbk. 141 pages. £12.99. ISBN: 9780701183851.