Nemerov relies on science for extended metaphors and themes more often than perhaps any other major contemporary American poet with the possible exception of A. R. Ammons. His use of science ranges from occasional references to articles in Scientific American to extended illustrations of the principles of quantum mechanics or the laws of thermodynamics. Nemerov's sources span several centuries and a variety of disciplines: he freely incorporates the images and ideas of medieval alchemy; Jakob Böhme's mystical treatise, The Signature of All Things; Goethe's Scientific Studies; Feynman's Lectures on Physics; Lewis Thomas's books on biology and medicine; and Scott Buchanan's analyses of the relationship between poetry and mathematics.

Critics like Joseph Warren Beach and Miriam Marty Clark have detected an old-fashioned disdain or a "mixed and often sardonic" attitude toward modern science in Nemerov's poetry. Yet Clark has also acknowledged that modern physics has provided for Nemerov's "Romantic conception of mind and nature an appealing set of metaphors and paradigms."^[1] A close examination of the specific targets of his satire suggests that Nemerov's disdain is directed not at Science per se, but at the Scientific Materialism that is the product of Newtonian physics. His primary objection to Scientific Materialism, or Positivism, is its insistence on an "objective reality" over which the observer has no control, and which ultimately denies the cognitive value of human perception, will and imagination.

In "The Dream of Reason," an essay that outlines his objections to some of the recent work of geneticists, Nemerov presents what he regards as the primary limitation of scientific materialism:

No doubt it is man's earnest and noble desire to control things, to make them accessible to reason, to make them predictable, and thus to change such of them as he finds undesirable. As long as he has to do with things, this object does not conflict with his other great object of freedom; rather, one increases the other, and that is an excellent reason for valuing very highly indeed the methods and achievements of science. But you cannot long have to do with things, without also having to do with people, and here the matter is less settled.^[2]

Barfield's Saving the Appearances, as we have seen, advocates a humanistic interpretation of scientific theory--a balance between the traditional approaches of science and literature--which closely reflects Nemerov's own position. Barfield observes that once we have established "the gulf which yawns between the atomic physical structure of nature and the appearances of the physical world," it is possible, "if we are physicists, to continue undisturbed with our investigations of the unappearing atomic structure, and, if we are philosophers, to leave it at that, being content with the metaphysical curiosity we have produced." However, he concludes that the far better response would be to "keep the gulf steadily in sight, instead of forgetting all about it again, and see what effect that has on our knowledge of other things, such as the evolution of nature and of man himself."^[3]

Unlike the positivists, who would insist that the scientific method--close observation of physical evidence--provides by itself a sufficient explanation for the world, both Nemerov and Barfield advocate seeing the world both through the eye and through the mind. Nemerov often develops analogies for the historical conflict between the two ways of seeing from within the context of specific scientific discoveries or disciplines.

In "Extract from Memoirs," for example, Nemerov encapsulates the history of science within the story of the development of the wheel. In the first stanza, the poet's narrator chronicles his invention of the wheel, after which he apprehends its significance from the perspective of pure mathematics: his subsequent discovery, the cycloid curve, is an abstraction based on the principle of the wheel. At the end of the day, the narrator proclaims, ". . . When darkness came, I sang/ My hymn to the great original wheels of heaven,/ And sank into a sleep peopled with gods."

This narrator, who serves as the spokesman for scientists throughout the ages, is capable of reconciling the discoveries of science with the quest for values. Yet in the final stanza, Nemerov parodies the public's failure to accept that interdependence. Although scientists have chosen to distance themselves from questions of belief as a means of maintaining a proper perspective on their work, their choice does not imply that such questions are no longer pertinent, as is frequently the public misconception. The poem's conclusion analogizes science's growing need to concentrate on pure theory to the apparent exclusion of metaphysical concerns:

When I communicated my results

To the celestial academies, sending them

Models along with my description, and

Their emissaries came to ask of me

"What are the implications of `the wheel'

For human values?" I was very lofty--

"I made the damn thing go around," I said.

"You fellows go and figure what it's for."

Similarly, "Druidic Rimes" renders the historical perspective of science through an overview of a single scientific discipline: Nemerov presents the major theories of astronomy from prehistory to the invention of the telescope, when "lights broke into being/ As if to marry the eye's seeing. . . ." Inevitably, the astronomers in the poem discover the proper relationship between the observer and the observed. Section II of this poem chronicles Physics' gradual transition beyond the visible, after which number became the only remaining primary quality. Yet at the end of this stanza, it is obvious that the New Physics has actually restored the ancient participation between humanity and phenomena:

Into the secret labyrinth

Of its own lens, and its first myth

Of sacrificing to the sky

The always naked eye.

Within modern astronomy itself, then, one can still distinguish traces of the "participation" that led primitive peoples to sacrifice themselves for the propitiation of the sky gods.

Inasmuch as the products of technology are necessarily based on concepts drawn from Newtonian physics, which is concerned solely with physically discernible phenomena (while Newtonian physics is unable to account for the subatomic world, it provides workable concepts for the everyday world), they inevitably promote a reductive concept of the human role in the universe. Machines, as the products of technology, provide Nemerov with particularly clear visual images for his critique against positivism.

In "Poetry, Prophecy, Prediction," Nemerov affiliates machines with the positivistic world view:

The invention of machines in its turn produces the image of a giant machine as a metaphor for the universe . . . but also, inevitably, as a metaphor for the mind, whose servile ambition henceforth shall be the progressively perfected imitation of relentless and mechanic order without other purpose than the maintenance of its sterile circularities, from which soul, spirit, mind itself at last, will be progressively excluded.^[4]

Another essay entitled, "On the Resemblances Between Science and Religion," by delineating the three parallel roles of Religion and Science, again implies that the positivistic approach to science leads to dehumanization. Religion's highest "realm," Nemerov contends, is "mysticism, vision, theology," whose counterpart in Science is pure science. Below that realm, Nemerov places "morals, the good life, order," whose scientific counterpart is "technology, progress, order." The lowest realm for both Religion and Science is that of superstition, in religion manifested in beliefs in such things as demons, ghosts, lucky amulets, and fortune-telling; and in science manifested in stories of machines that overtake their creators, or (on the positive side) miracle drugs that reverse the aging process.

Nemerov contends that in the highest realm, one finds the true source for "the practical world," among men who "deal purely and in a humble spirit with the simple and ineluctable mystery of The Word, The Logos, The Divine Name, Energy, Mass, Light, Number, and so on."

In the second realm, however, the Logos has "descended into matter, and crucified there becomes the weapon and the cause." Nemerov decries this realm as "the world . . . of coinage that reads on one side, `in God we trust,' and on the other, `five cents.'" In this realm, the power of order is valued above all else, and the eternal verities of religion are reduced to self-righteous platitudes: "love another as thyself necessarily becomes the Albigensian Crusade and E= mc² is necessarily realized as a nuclear weapon."^[5]

In the third realm, which includes "the more and less complicated idolatries," the instrumentalities of both science and religion are hypostatized as "beings." Nemerov notes that the practices in this realm are in many ways no more insane than those in the second realm: both idolize technology at the expense of humanity.

Throughout his fiction and poetry, Nemerov associates technology with idolatry because it leads to an emphasis on the material world to the exclusion of spiritual values. Like Barfield, Nemerov broadens the traditional definition of idolatry to include any "valuing of images or representations in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons."^[6]

Barfield particularly associates the development of the machine with the proliferation of the idolatrous view of the world. With the development of the machine, he asserts, humans first began to assume "that bodies can go on moving indefinitely without an animate or psychic `mover.'" Furthermore, "The whole point of a machine is, that, for as long as it goes on moving, it `goes on by itself' without man's participation. To the extent. . .  that the phenomena are experienced as machine, they are believed to exist independently of man, not to be participated and therefore not to be in the nature of representations."^[7]

Judging from the marginalia in his copy of Saving the Appearances, Nemerov was particularly intrigued by Barfield's association of technology with idolatry. Perhaps his most extended application of Barfield's argument is the opening section of The Next Room of the Dream, entitled "Effigies."

In The Shield of Perseus, Bartholomay examines the various "effigies," or "idols" that Nemerov describes in that section, which include photographs, television, department store mannequins and other products of technology. Bartholomay suggests that, "Even newspapers and television are effigies of a kind, in the sense that they imprint visual images on people's minds day after day, and in so doing, confirm human beings in the habit of regarding these representations as the only reality."^[8]

Nemerov's essay, "Poetry and Meaning," contrasts the languages of poetry and of the press, obliquely alluding to Barfield's definition of idolatry:

. . .  the public language of press and the other media imposes upon us a public dream, a phantasy written in a language that is neither right nor wrong but, say, serviceable. Not so much that it tells us what to think, though it tries to do that as well, but it makes of no avail our freedom of thought by telling us what we must have these thoughts about, and by progressively and insensibly filling us with a low, dull language for thinking them.

Aside from Nemerov's many satires of newspaper journalism (discussed in chapter one), his antipathy toward the media is expressed primarily through his poetry about photography. Nemerov's poetry presents photography as a deceptive and superficial substitute for painting. Furthermore, while discussing the well-known photography of his sister, Diane Arbus, in Journal of the Fictive Life, Nemerov attests to his propensity to regard photographs as "graven images," observing that, "The camera, interested in surfaces, grew with a materialist civilization interested in `simple location in time and space' (Whitehead), and makes the constant claim that reality is visible. Language, on the contrary, constantly asserts reality to be secret, invisible, a product of relations rather than things."^[9]

Even as early as his first volume, The Image and the Law, two poems entitled, "An Old Photograph" and "The Photograph of a Girl," render their subjects as graven images: in the first poem, the girl in the old photograph is "a frozen image in the wilderness," and the narrator refers to himself as the first of her "idolaters"; in the second, the girl's face is engraved as an image is upon a coin. While the descriptions literally allude to the various steps in the photographic process, they are also the first manifestations of a recurrent motif in Nemerov's poetry.

Philip Larkin's reservations about photography, particularly as revealed in his "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album," are certainly shared by Nemerov:

But O, photography! as no art is,

Faithful and disappointing! that records

Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,

And will not censor blemishes,

Like washing-lines, and Hall's Distemper Boards,

But shows the cat as disinclined, and shades

A chin as doubled when it is, What grace

Your candor thus confers upon her face!

How overwhelmingly persuades

That this is a real girl in a real place. . . .^[10]

Larkin's "Lines" is undoubtedly part of the impetus for Nemerov's 1990 tribute to Larkin, simply entitled "Larkin," in which Nemerov praises Larkin as "the master of a style/ Able to see things as he saw through things."^[11] Like Larkin, Nemerov is deeply disappointed that photography's devotion to "seeing" often leads it to neglect the equally important task of "seeing through"; both writers question photography's reductive assumption that the "real" world can be entirely contained within a visual image.

Nemerov believes that television is even more likely than photography to attenuate the complexity and ambiguity that characterize human life. In "Attentiveness and Obedience," for example, he writes, "It is the contention of my poetry very often that the world is increasingly, and with an increasing acceleration, dominated by habitual idolatry, by images for which my first representation was that of statues. The extension of the argument to television . . . is not difficult."^[12]

"Mousemeal," a poem prompted by a morning that Nemerov spent watching cartoons with his son, is a particularly effective satire on television. Because cartoons are largely based on caricature and oversimplification, they best exemplify television's own reductive view of the world. Nemerov is especially disturbed that military propaganda has been disguised as entertainment (the ogres wear "Mussolini's face"), and that the images of violence and racism ("savage Negro mice" are "put through a wringer and stacked flat in the cellar"), are so painlessly and thoroughly absorbed by his unsuspecting son. He concludes: "I hope he will ride over this world as well,/ And that his crudest and most terrifying dreams/ will not return with such wide publicity."

Television, Nemerov suggests, records the atrocities of history without forcing the viewer to confront the reality of the lives that were lost in the course of history. Throughout both his fiction and his poetry, Nemerov continually disparages the distance that the television screen creates between the observer and reality.

In "A Singular Metamorphosis," Nemerov's satiric target again is television. The family in the poem, who congregate to watch a television game show, become so completely transfixed by the dead stare of the T.V.'s "eye" that they fail to notice that the escritoire in the corner of their living room suddenly bursts into bloom. The development of the contrast between the two objects, one a product of technology, and the other a symbol of the writing process, underscores the distinction between televised image and written word.

Nemerov's use of the word "metamorphoses" likewise implies the function of metaphor in poetry. The escritoire undergoes a transformation that parallels the way in which poetry transforms visible forms into abstract and multivalent ideas. After having been abandoned "in the gloomiest corner of the room/ far from the television," the escritoire spontaneously bears flowers and fruit, thereby attesting to the mystery and magic inherent in poetic composition.

The gloominess in the corner of the room produces shadows, which, as in most of Nemerov's poems, are the emblems of ambiguity; by contrast, the sharp light of the television suggests nothing beyond the superficial and simple facts that can be immediately grasped by anyone. Similarly, positivism, by construing a world apart from human perception, repudiates the richer, albeit infinitely more ambiguous, world of human experience.

The television and the escritoire also represent, respectively, literal and figurative language, and, more specifically, the languages of the media and of poetry. The television viewers prefer the safe and unambiguous world of facts presented in the quiz show, where one must merely distinguish between Montagues and Capulets, but where one is never required to understand the underlying motivations of the characters, much less that part of Shakespeare that we take for wisdom.

Lewis Thomas, one of Nemerov's many scientific mentors, observes that a primary distinction between animals and humans arises from the inherent ambiguity in human language:

Ambiguity seems to be an essential, indispensable element for the transfer of information from one place to another by words, where matters of real importance are concerned. It is often necessary, for meaning to come through, that there be an almost vague sense of strangeness and askewness. . . . Only the human mind is designed to work in this way, programmed to drift away in the presence of locked-on information, straying from each point in a hunt for a better, different point. If it were not for the capacity for ambiguity, for the sensing of strangeness. . .  we would have no way of recognizing the layers of counterpoint in meaning, and we might be spending all our time sitting on stone fences, staring into the sun.^[13]

In "The Sunglasses," Nemerov relies on another product of technology to portray the modern failure to confront the inherent ambiguity of life. "The Blue Swallows" had attested to the necessity of "seeing again the world. . .  where loveliness adorns intelligible things," thereby restoring the proper relationship between the perceiver and the world; however, in "The Sunglasses," the wearer of the sunglasses has clearly alienated himself from that world: "I stare unpunished at the sun's wild limb/ Of Satan wavering westward past the noon/ In a mild fire, foolish gold. . . ."

As products of technology, the sunglasses become symbols for the distance that technology places between humanity and the world. Nemerov suggests that although the sunglasses are valued for their ability to reduce the glare of the sun, they also give their wearer a dangerously false impression of the world. They indeed allow for "lucidity," yet lucidity is in this case a kind of betrayal, since it denies the complexity of the world. The sunglasses dilute experience: in this poem, Satan, and not Apollo, moves westward across the sky, yet the wearer of the sunglasses can see the sun as nothing more than a harmless speck of fool's gold.

Moreover, Nemerov implies that technological advances have even separated humanity from the vantage point of pure science: to the wearer, the sun is no longer a flaming star that provides heat and light, but merely a distant, cool speck in the viewer's vision. Nemerov depicts the way in which the sunglasses turn the wearer's "drowning eyes to stone," indicating that technology, by separating humans from the world of magic and myth, has ultimately destroyed the proof of their humanity; furthermore, by distancing them from the real power of nature, the products of technology have alienated them from the very source of their existence.

The automobile, another technological product that Nemerov associates with idolatry, is the subject of "Ozymandius II." The poem's title alludes of course to Shelley's "Ozymandius," in which the once splendid monument for a king has been reduced to "two vast and trunkless legs of stone," a "colossal wreck."^[14] Although Nemerov describes the automobile as one of the "monuments" of America, the "rust like a fungus spreading on the fenders," and the motheaten upholstery indicate that its worshippers have failed to anticipate its planned obsolescence.

In "A Clock with No Hands," Nemerov again establishes the connection between technology and idolatry, simultaneously attesting to the futility of mechanism. Describing a clock in the abandoned waiting room of a train station, Nemerov concludes by chastizing the clock watcher:

Idolater, this moony god,

Whose sleight-of-hand will run no road,

May blandly yet discountenance

Your travels where the still mainspring,

Behind the even and the odd,

Hides in its coiled continuing

A venomous tense past tense.

"Sleight-of-hand" indicates the deceptiveness of clock time, and consequently, the ultimate futility of humanity's earnest efforts to follow the clock. Clock time represents a bland, mechanical interpretation of existence that attenuates its followers' internal clocks. By using an empty waiting room of an abandoned train station as his setting, Nemerov emphasizes that the motion of the mechanical hands of the clock is perfectly pointless when there is no one around to observe it. Furthermore, its hands are finally stolen by an "empty-handed vandal," another reminder that human hands triumph over mechanical hands every time. The "venomous tense past tense" is reminiscent of the original deceiver, the Serpent in Eden, and is also a play on words for the way that clock time is typically expressed, as in, say, "ten past ten."

The clock never really provides, in universal terms, an accurate assessment of reality; humans merely choose to be governed by the movement of its hands. In one of the poem's many puns, Nemerov cautions that the clock will ultimately "discountenance" the traveler, i.e., cause him to "lose face," or identity. The clock becomes a symbol of the kind of technology that denies human freedom and imagination, and thus is the antithesis of everything that poetry represents.

Strother B. Purdy's The Hole in the Fabric offers a helpful analogy to Nemerov's distinction concerning time. "Time for us," he suggests, is relative in that it exists as something that each individual experiences independently, and in a constantly varying manner: "Time for us is thus not something independent grinding inexorably along whether experienced or not. Such time is, as an abstraction, the product of Newtonian theory, and is therefore often called clock time."^[15]

In an essay entitled, "On Time," Nemerov writes that, "Probably. . .  the collective time we read from clocks, the one that is theoretically the same for everyone and moving at a constant speed from the beginning of the universe to the end of the universe, is an entity as fictitious as money, and as mysteriously powerful."^[16] Time, like money, is "fictitious" because its value is relative, and so, while Nemerov is always quick to praise the science that accounts for the complexity of human existence, he invariably rejects the scientific materialism that ignores this relativity, representing humanity as mechanistic, devoid of free will and the capacity for aesthetic appreciation.

The title of his poem, "Life Cycle of Common Man" is deliberately generic and stripped of determiners to introduce his parody of the sterile, objective approach of the typical article in a scientific journal. The poem describes the "common man" in the jargon of statistics, as the bland and insignificant product of the law of averages:

Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits,

This average consumer of the middle class,

Consumed in the course of his average life span

Just under half a million cigarettes,

Four thousand fifths of gin and about

A quarter as much vermouth. . . 

Nemerov's use of the terms and methodology of statistics further underscores the dehumanizing effects of scientific materialism.

To emphasize the incompatibility of true vision with technological advancement, Nemerov sometimes juxtaposes various elements of modern society with loftier rhetoric drawn from religion and politics. Even many of his titles, such as, "Grace to be Said at the Supermarket," "The Great Society, Mark X," and "Suburban Prophecy," exemplify the incongruity between technological progress and spiritual enlightenment. Because society is dominated by time-saving technology, the false notion arises that even peace and happiness may be achieved effortlessly, at a small cost to its seekers.

Clearly then, while Nemerov's poems often appear to be superficially "unscientific," they are by no means attacks on science, but on the dehumanizing tendencies of scientific materialism. Even in an early poem, "Unscientific Postscript," Nemerov restricts his reservations only to the positivistic approach to science, which denies all phenomena except that which is presumably objectifiable. Attesting to his preference for the world of poetry over that of science, Nemerov describes poetry as, "Neither real nor false nor subject to belief. . . . But as in life/ Reflexive, multiple, with the brilliance of/ The shining surface, an orchestral flare." Further, Nemerov values poetry's capacity for, "making an answer, even if lament,/ In measured dance, with the whole instrument." Nemerov's lines on the function of poetry, as I will demonstrate, are also apt descriptions of the function of modern science.

Like Owen Barfield, Nemerov is receptive toward the tendency of modern physics to "implicate the observer again in the phenomena," a sharp departure from the previous system of thought, which interested itself in phenomena only to the extent that they could be grasped independent of consciousness. In Saving the Appearances, Barfield speaks of the need for "a sustained acceptance by the reader of the relationship assumed by physical science to subsist between human consciousness on one hand, and, on the other, the familiar world of which that consciousness is aware."^[17]

For both Nemerov and Barfield, the metaphor for this "sustained acceptance" is drawn from a principle of the New Physics. Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity concludes that, depending on our choice of experiment, "light can appear to consist of either waves or particles."^[18] Thus, what we experience cannot be said to be external, objective reality, but our own interaction with it.

In Saving the Appearances, Barfield provides a layman's explanation of the concept, instructing his reader to consider the constitution of a tree. He writes,

Recollect all that you have been told about matter and its ultimate structure and ask yourself if the tree is "really there." I am far from affirming dogmatically that the atoms, electrons, nuclei, etc. of which wood, and all matter, is said to be composed, are particular and identifiable objects like drops of rain . . . . a tree is the outcome of the particles and my vision and my other sense-perceptions.^[19]

Although Nemerov alludes to the wave/particle theory in Gnomes and Occasions (the lawn sprinkler that "holds at both ends of the day the rainbow in its scattering grains of spray), it does not receive its fullest expression until his next volume, The Western Approaches. In his poem, "Seeing Things," (whose title incorporates a pun--"seeing things" is colloquial for hallucinating), Nemerov relies on Bohr's wave/particle theory to demonstrate that physics, like poetry, is a process of metaphor-making:

Close as I ever came to seeing things

The way the physicists say things really are

Was out on Sudbury Marsh one summer eve

When a silhouetted tree against the sun

Seemed at my sudden glance to be afire:

A black and boiling smoke made all its shape.

Here, the bush is simultaneously substance and non-substance: smoke, or fire, signifies the insubstantial and non-representational aspect of reality; while the "cloud of gnats" that comprises it signifies the substantial and representational aspect. Nemerov describes the physicists' imaginative reconstruction of the object of investigation in much the same way that William Blake describes phenomena. Blake's childhood vision of a tree full of angels, mentioned by virtually all of his biographers as one of the earliest examples of his unique imaginative capacity, establishes a similar relationship between corporeal and incorporeal aspects of reality. Nemerov's description of the tree also parallels the description in Exodus of the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses, further strengthening the connection of physics to the visionary. While examining the tree through binoculars, Nemerov discovers that the cloud is actually a swarm of gnats; in other words, while reality itself appears to be continuous, all of one piece, it is composed of millions of smaller parts--and thus can be described as both wave and particle: "As by the motion of the many made the one/ Shape constant and kept it so in both the forms/ I'd thought to see, the fire and the tree." Thus, a complete impression of the tree (or, analogously, any picture of reality) ultimately requires the power of the imagination in addition to the instruments of science. Both visions are interdependent.

In "Drawing Lessons," points and lines are the artistic equivalents of particles and waves; just as the physicists claim that particles and waves are the shapes that define the world, the artist renders his "world" solely by means of points and lines. "`Today we shall explore the mystery,'" Nemerov writes, "`Of points and lines moving over the void--/ We call it paper-- to imitate the world.'" The account of the creation as presented in Genesis maintains that the spirit of God moved over the void before creating the world. Likewise, the points and lines are depicted "moving over the void"; here, however, they not only "create," but "imitate" the world.

In "Speculative Equations: Poems, Poets, Computers," Nemerov illustrates his theory by referring to a book on drawing entitled Creative Drawing: Point and Line: "Figuration by point or line according to very simple rules ever so often unintentionally produces forms that resemble the forms of nature . . . . perhaps the wave-particle question is but one more reflection of the way in which point and line compose the visual world."^[20]

Finally, Nemerov's knowledge of the physics of wave and particle underscores the inseparability of the two ways of seeing--through the eye and through the mind. Moreover, he demonstrates the interdependence of these two ways of seeing by combining this theory with his direct observations of nature: any naturalist has observed that waves break into drops, or particles, when they reach the shore.

So point and line not only turn into

Each other, but each hides from the other, too.

The seed of a point grows into a tree of line,

The line unfolding generates the plane

Of the world, perspective space in light and shade.

In "The Measure of Poetry," Nemerov again describes the world as both wave and particle, suggesting that poetry is uniquely capable of accommodating the two ways of "seeing things." This time he relies on the imagery of ocean waves:

"The sum of these conflicting, cooperating powers,/with the prevailing wind, generates individual forms and/ Moments of great charm too complex to be analyzed except In a general way,/ and as unpredictable in their particularity as/ The rainbow which sometimes glimmers in the spray blown/ From the falling crest." In typical Nemerovian fashion, the poem deftly transforms the technical language of physics into a series of related themes.

First, the relationship between wave and particle becomes a symbol for the general relation of the individual to the past. "Running water and standing stone," in "A Spell Before Winter" and elsewhere, become the images for wave and particle. Throughout Nemerov's poetry, stones represent the domination of past over present, and of tradition over the individual. In "Attentiveness and Obedience," for instance, he expresses his "growing preoccupations with statues . . . as representing the rigid domination of the past over present and future . . . the standing stone that looks over the landscape assumes early in history a human face . . . becomes a god." In The Shield of Perseus, Bartholomay contends that, "in rejecting the statuesque and the historical, Nemerov is repudiating not only the rigid domination of the past, but also a mirror of nature that is purely visual, recording only the surfaces of things and the erosive effects of time."

Water, on the other hand, represents for Nemerov, "human perception and human imagination." In Nemerov's depiction of the flow of the stream, one finds that, "the actual and ideal ripple together, reflected in the eye of the mind, where, in the still form, running remains."^[21] Although the stones may direct the course of the stream, the stream, through the force of erosion, gradually shapes the stones. Thus, Nemerov's illustration of the relationship between water and stone becomes a metaphor for the dynamic relationship between history and the individual: ". . . how could you tell the stream but by its rocky bed, the rocks directing the water how to flow, the water--much more slowly--shaping the rocks according to its flow. . . ."^[22]

The interaction between wave and particle also corresponds, in poetic theory, to the relationship between individual poets and the poetic tradition from which they draw their material. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" emphasizes that, "the poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations." Furthermore, just as the configurations of stone and water are interdependent, the past is "altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past."^[23]

Finally, Nemerov's use of the wave/particle theory in "The Measure of Poetry" suggests that poetry renders reality in a way that physics cannot: it can capture "moments of great charm too complex to be analyzed except in a general way." His phrase, "Too complex to be analyzed except in a general way," is perhaps a subtle allusion to the "general" theory of relativity-- Einstein's discovery that, in a gravitational field, it is impossible to distinguish between an accelerated frame of reference and an inertial frame of reference. In short, Nemerov implies that poetry is capable of making the very fine distinctions that elude physics because it offers us the chance to deal directly and specifically with subjective human questions.

The important distinction between science and poetry is that poetry uses words not merely to present pure knowledge, but to create effects. I. A. Richards' Science and Poetry asserts that a successful poem requires, "Both a passionate knowledge of poetry and a capacity for dispassionate psychological analysis. . . ." Richards contends further that while science may be our most elaborate way of "pointing to things systematically," it tells us nothing about the nature of things in any ultimate sense" because its purposes lie elsewhere.^[24]

Despite the acknowledged differences between science and poetry, the New Physics begins to resemble romanticism in its insistence that observer and observed are united in a real and fundamental sense. When a physicist "observes" subatomic particles, he is really only observing correlations, which in turn depend for their existence on previously formed concepts. Obviously, the concepts themselves would not exist but for the physicists who formulate them. Because all matter is ultimately reducible to the subatomic level the implication of the discoveries of the New Physics are indeed far-reaching (Zukav 112). In his introduction to modern physics, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Gary Zukav takes these assumptions to their logical extreme: "Without us, light does not exist."^[25]

When Nemerov alludes to the concepts of the New Physics, he likewise relies frequently on the visionary poetry of Blake, indicating that he is fully aware of this parallel between the New Physics and romanticism. Blake's rejection of Newtonian physics, evident in his famous maxim, "the eye altering alters all," is alluded to throughout Nemerov's essays, and even as early as his first volume of poetry. In "The Frozen City," for example, a dialogue between St. Augustine and William Blake includes the following passage attributed to Blake: "Jerusalem, desiring the vine/ Blindly we have built the machine:/ For the eye altering alters all."

In "Speculative Equations: Poems, Poets, and Computers," Nemerov cites lines from Jerusalem as evidence for Blake's prophetic powers. While delineating the theme of Blake's Jerusalem, Nemerov also reveals the impetus for a good deal of his own poetry: "the rebellion of the poet, or fourfold human, against machinery, against all geometric regularity and repetition, for which the poet's symbols are the mill, the loom, the water wheel. . .  the "starry wheels" of Jehovah's or Urizen's dead or dying universe, locked `in single vision & Newton's sleep.'" ^[26]

Another romantic poet to whom Nemerov often refers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, also seems to anticipate the discoveries of the New Physics. Goethe's Scientific Studies refutes scientific materialism, insisting instead on the same close relationship between physical and spiritual sight to which physicists later attested. Newton had based his hypotheses on a complex, secondary experiment, one which required the creation of artificial relationships to connect it with other, basic phenomena. Goethe, however, emphasizes the dynamic interaction between observer and observed. Goethe's romantic conception of optics, found in his Scientific Studies, emphasizes a necessary relation between light and dark:

The eye is formed by the light and for the light so that the inner light may emerge to meet the outer light. . . . the eye has within it a latent form of light which becomes active at the slightest stimulus from within or without. We can evoke dazzling inner images in the dark through the power of our imagination. In dreaming, we can see objects as though in the clear light of day. When awake, we can perceive the slightest impression of light from without, and we even find that when the eye is stuck, a burst of color and light is seen.^[27]

In Journal of the Fictive Life, Nemerov relies on the same Goethian conception of vision, in which the light within the eye is able to produce images even in the dark, and for which our experience of every sensation is a sort of bridge between the outer world of perception and the inner world of feeling. Recalling his delight in finding the harmony between science and poetry in Sir Charles Sherrington's book, Man on His Nature (briefly discussed in chapter two), Nemerov cites an essay in which Sherrington had described the making of the eye by means of an eye-camera analogy. Aware that Sherrington's metaphors were intrinsic to his own poetry, Nemerov notes the following observation as "particularly striking": "all this making of the eye which will see in the light is carried out in the dark. It is a preparing in darkness for use in light."^[28]

The description of seeing serves not only as an analogy for the camera, but also for human consciousness, the "mind's eye" to which Nemerov refers in "The Blue Swallows." In Plato's allegory of the cave, the cave dwellers must first adjust their eyes to the dim light of the cave, after which they are prepared to experience the essences of things that they had previously known only as shadows. Significantly, Nemerov makes no distinction between the eye and the "mind's eye," or the imagination.

Likewise, in "Runes," the water of the eye is likened to "a needle threaded/ From the reel of a raveling stream," which is simultaneously a metaphor for eyesight and for the stream of consciousness that is absorbed by the "mind's eye." Rune X may be seen as an elaboration of this relationship; in particular the "meniscus where the strider walks on drowning water" has double significance: in optics, it describes the lens of the eye, which becomes convex or concave in response to the amount of light to which it is exposed. In physics, it refers to the curved upper surface of a liquid column, which is either convex or concave depending on the liquid in the container. The salt water of the eye corresponds to the salt water of the ocean, yet the analogy transcends the physical act of perception.

In an essay entitled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Skylark," Nemerov relies on similar terms to discuss the way in which poetry works:

. . . poetry works on the very surface of the eye, that thin, unyielding wall of liquid between mind and world, where, somehow, mysteriously, the patterns formed by electrical storms assaulting the retina become things and the thought of things and the names of things and the relations supposed between things. . . . in its highest range the theory of poetry would be the theory of the Incarnation, which seeks to explain how the Word became Flesh and why it was necessary for the Word to do this. . . .^[29]

Elsewhere Nemerov indicates that unless modern poetry acknowledges this relationship between mind and world, it can never go beyond self-consciousness, and risks losing entirely its capacity to communicate ideas. R. K. Meiners' essay on confessional poetry in Sugarman's The Evolution of Consciousness perhaps most succinctly expresses Nemerov's fears: "Our art. . .  has turned inward into our lives, our consciousness, for substance; and we have plundered our lives and consciousness for fuel for passion and art, and we are very close to destroying them."^[30] Meiners concludes that it is essential to the survival of poetry and of humanity to "challenge the proposition that the human intelligence is inherently isolated from the totality of nature."^[31]

Because the New Physics acknowledges the underlying unity between thought and thing which Nemerov believes is indispensable to poetry, he often derives his metaphors from the theories of the New Physics. In "The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House," for example, this unity governs the technique of the painter:

He follows through the flowing of the forms

From the divisions of the trunk out to

The veinings of the leaf, and the leaf's fall.

His pencil meditates the many in the one

After the method in the confluence of rivers,

The running of ravines on mountainsides,

And in the deltas of the nerves; he sees

How things must be continuous with themselves

As with whole worlds that they themselves are not,

In order that they may be so transformed.

Similarly, in "The Crossing," Nemerov alludes to the New Physical theory of Brownian motion, formulated by Robert Brown in 1827, to illustrate the unity that underlies natural processes. Brownian motion refers to the "apparently random movement of microscopic particles suspended in liquids or gases resulting from the impact of molecules of the fluid surrounding the particles."^[32] Yet the variety that results from this motion is ultimately essential to the evolution of the species. Nemerov observes that while the butterflies in flight seem to drift at random through the sky, their apparently random movement has a discernible purpose:

Though what you mostly see is a random light

Meandering, a Brownian movement to the wind,

Which is one of Nature's ways of getting it done,

Whatever it may be, the rise of hills

And settling of seas, the fall of leaf

Across the shoulder of the northern world,

The snowflakes one by one that silt the field. . . 

All that's preparing now behind the scene,

As the ecliptic and equator cross,

Through which the light butterflies are flying.

Nemerov's interest in Lewis Thomas is partially the result of Thomas's compelling observations of this seemingly random but purposive movement in human life. In an essay entitled, "The Wonderful Mistake," Thomas reveals the elaborate pattern that underlies the apparent randomness in the evolutionary process:

The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music. Viewed individually, one by one, each of the mutations that have brought us along represents a random, totally spontaneous accident, but it is no accident at all that mutations occur; the molecule of DNA was ordained from the beginning to make small mistakes.^[33]

Because of his awareness of the underlying pattern in nature, Nemerov often attributes a kind of consciousness to nature. In "A Spell Before Winter," the pun on "spell" implies a supernatural force behind even the smallest changes in the seasons. He writes, "There is a knowledge in the look of things,/ The old hills hunch before the north wind blows." He then proceeds to "see" and "say over" "certain simplicities" in nature, such as "the yellow haze of the willow and the black/ Smoke of the elm," as if he is uttering incantations that will actually imbue the world with meaning and purpose.

Similarly, while walking across the campus of Washington University one day in late summer, Nemerov gravely observed to me that the trees knew that winter was approaching; each year, around September, their leaves would begin to curl, and draw more closely to the branches, as if in a final effort to keep from falling. Such comments are indicative of the poet's personal need to discern the pattern and purpose behind events that seem to occur unconsciously, and they echo the fundamentals of Goethean science, in which consciousness permeates the world.

This carefully concealed pattern in nature is the theme of the epigraph, taken from Albrecht von Haller, with which Nemerov begins the second section of his tenth volume of poetry, The Western Approaches: "Nature knits up her kinds in a network, not in a chain; but men can follow only by chains because their language can't handle several things at once." The Western Approaches also represents the culmination of Nemerov's interest in the sciences. The title refers to the familiar distinction between Eastern and Western thought, and in particular, to the Western tendency to rely on Science as the predominant way of understanding and interpreting the world. From approximately 1450 to 1800, when Western scientific thought flourished, the East's interest in science came to a virtual standstill,^[34] a fact that intrigued Nemerov.

The first section of The Western Approaches, "The Way," recalls the great religious teachings of the East, The Tao, which is usually translated as, "The Way." Yet all of the poems in this section focus on science rather than religion, suggesting that science has become the Western replacement for religion.

In "The Metaphysical Automobile," one of the poems in "The Way," Nemerov relies on one principle of modern science to defend his preference for poetry over logic:

. . .  So straight

Flat roads of logic lie about a globe

On which the shortest way between two points

Happens to be a curve. And so do song 

And story, winding crank and widdershins,

Still get there first, and poetry remains

Eccentric and odd and riddling and right,

Eternal return of the excluded middle.

Here, Nemerov combines the theories of two ostensibly incompatible "sciences": modern science's assertion that, at least in space, the shortest distance between two points is a curve; and alchemy's use of the circle as the symbol of eternity. He finds common ground for both of them. Indeed, Scott Buchanan's book, The Doctrine of Signatures, to which Nemerov often refers in his essays, acknowledges that the alchemical descriptions for phenomena are actually more consistent with the principles of New physics than are the Newtonian descriptions.

Throughout The Western Approaches, the first and second laws of thermodynamics are frequently incorporated to illustrate the principle of complementarity. The first law states that, whenever energy is converted in form, its total quantity does not change; and the second law states that, in a closed system, entropy does not decrease. "Route Two" cleverly illustrates the interrelationship of these laws: as the poet travels along Route Two, he sees a sign "that might epitomize/ The ambition of Free Enterprise," which reads, "Save While You Spend." He then speculates that the sign, by advocating "pouring money down the drain/ As long as it was one's own drain," suggests "a way to beat the Second Law." The road on which he travels contrasts sharply with the swamp in which the sign stands, symbolizing the interdependence of order and chaos, and, by implication, of the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.

Nemerov also pairs the two laws with the "Old" and "New" laws of the Judeo-Christian tradition, as in the poem "Two Pair." Comparing the world to a gambling game, Nemerov remarks that, "more money's lost. . .  on two pair than on any other hand. . . ." In a series of rhymed couplets (particularly appropriate for his theme), his "two pair" acquires new dimensions:

The first pair tells us we may be redeemed,

But in a world, the other says, that's doomed.

In one, the First Law says: Nothing is Lost.

The other First Law adds: But we are lost.

By pairing Mosaic and Christian laws (which, according to Christian doctrine, are mutually inexclusive, based on Christ's claim in Matthew 5:17, that he came not to "destroy the law. . .  but to fulfil {it}," which precedes his reinterpretation of the laws of Moses, the Decalogue), Nemerov demonstrates a comparable relationship between the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.

The theory of modern physics that occurs throughout Nemerov's poetry, and which best demonstrates the limitations of scientific materialism, is the special theory of relativity. Gary Zukav briefly summarizes the theory this way in The Dancing Wu Li Masters: "a moving object appears to contract in the direction of motion as its velocity increases. . . ," a phenomenon "analogous to a projection of the real world onto the wall of Plato's cave."^[35] As a result of this theory, physicists concluded that they could not see through to reality, but could at best uncover some of their illusions about reality. The special theory of relativity has undermined preconceptions about time by asserting that space and time are not two separate things, but that together they form space-time.^[36] New physics, by banishing the linear concept of time, subverts familiar notions of cause and effect. Thus, our sense that things happen merely at random may only be due to our inability to see beyond a linear concept of time, and a correspondingly simplistic notion of cause and effect.

This new conception of time is undoubtedly behind Nemerov's contention, in his essay, "On Time," that the commonly accepted notion of time is nothing more than a convenient fiction: "That time passes is an item of my belief as of yours; it is scarcely ever questioned by anyone except by lovers, shamans, priests, poets, and physicists, and by these only on certain occasions and in specific applications."^[37]

"Lines & Circularities" describes Casals' recording of Bach's Sixth Suite to illustrate that time is actually cyclical rather than linear. Watching the record spin around, Nemerov notes, "How time, that comes and goes and vanishes/ Never to come again, can come again." He then catalogues the various natural processes that seem to confirm the cyclical nature of time:

The earth, that spins around upon herself

In the simple composition of Light and Dark,

And varying her distance on the Sun

Makes up the Seasons and the Years, and Time

Itself, whereof the angels make record;

The Sun, swinging his several satellites 

Around himself and slowly round the vast

Galactic rim and out to the unknown

Past Vega at the apex of his path;

And all this in the inward of the mind,

Where the great cantor sings his songs to God. . . .

In The Western Approaches, a poem entitled, "Fugue" equates Nemerov's paradox, "the stillness in moving things," with the principle of relativity. Humanity is portrayed as a multitude of drivers who "vanish in their speeding cars," all facing the front, which represents their futures. In the last stanza, Nemerov writes, "And still at speed they fly away, as still/ As the road paid out beneath them as it flows/ Moment by moment into the mirrored past. . . ." From the drivers' perspective, the road moves while they sit still, but an outside observer sees instead the cars moving over a still road.

Nemerov's modern version of Plato's allegory, "The Human Condition," is most compatible with the description of the world according to the special theory of relativity. The poem's narrator waits in a motel room as "day falls into darkness," seeing the car's headlights through the picture window, yet never entirely accepting the reality of the images outside. Magritte's painting, the source for the title of the poem as well as its central image, depicts an illusion of reality: a landscape that "stands/ Before a window opening on a land-/scape, and the pair of them a perfect fit."

Such knowledge, in which "world and thought exactly meet," is denied to the perceiver; Nemerov surmises that this painting of a painting" could only have been placed in an empty room, i.e., could only exist apart from human perception. The pause between "land" and "scape" emphasizes the unfulfilled expectations of the perceiver; he hopes to see reality, only to find that he has encountered merely another illusion of reality. The break in the line likewise produces in the reader a private sense of wistfulness, and perhaps despair, over the breach between appearance and reality.

Despite his despair at the prospect of never finding a union between mind and thought, Nemerov emphasizes throughout the poem that he is waiting and hoping for something, although he cannot say what it is. He also leaves it unclear as to who has instructed him to wait. His pointedly ambiguous statements suggest the poem's metaphysical implications while avoiding allegiance to any specific theological system.

The sense of uncertainty in Nemerov's poem has its counterpart in science. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that, ". . .  there are limits beyond which we cannot measure accurately, at the same time, the processes of nature. . .  as we penetrate deeper and deeper into the subatomic realm, we reach a certain point at which one part or another of our picture of nature becomes blurred, and there is no way to reclarify that part without blurring another part of the picture."^[38] This conclusion was based on his discovery that he could not measure accurately, at the same time, both the position and the momentum of a moving particle. Unlike Heisenberg's principle, the Galilean relativity principle upon which Newtonian Physics relies assumes that somewhere in the universe there exists a frame of reference in which the laws of mechanics are completely valid-- that is, a frame of reference where experiment and theory agree perfectly; however, nobody has as yet found such a place.

The awareness of the inherent limitations of the positivistic interpretation of scientific method was also produced by growing uncertainty of another kind: evidence that nature and the mathematical representation of nature (on which science has come to depend) are not the same. Whereas earlier scientists--particularly Leibnitz and Newton--had posited a pre-established harmony between mathematics and nature, Kurt Gödel's 1931 paper, "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems," asserted that, "The consistency of any mathematical system that is extensive enough to embrace even the arithmetic of whole numbers cannot be established by the logical foundational schools, the logicists, the formalists, and the set-theorists."^[39]

In The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the "New Science" Upon Seventeenth Century Poetry, Marjorie Nicholson observes that while modern descriptions of the cosmos are accepted as analogies (or "appearances," according to Barfield's terminology), the cosmology of Renaissance poets was "not mere analogy to them; it was the truth." Further, "what once seemed `identicals' have become in our modern world only `similars.'"^[40]

"Beginner's Guide," Nemerov's satirical description of a nature watcher, portrays the reaction of science to this loss of certainty. The "beginner" in the poem is a nature lover who believes that if he only collects and catalogs his findings diligently and long enough, he will finally be able to comprehend the world. However, his search merely leads to greater chaos and confusion. As he reminisces about his search, he considers:

Was it a waste, the time and the expense,

Buying the books, going into the field

To make some mind of what was only sense,

And show a profit on the year's rich yield?

The poem depicts the process by which he puts his obsession into perspective, after which the books "stand in the corner, on a shadowy shelf . . . / Remainders of an abdicated self/ That wanted knowledge of no matter what . . ." Here, "wanted" means both "desired" and "lacked." Regardless of the nature watcher's efforts to observe phenomena, his knowledge remains incomplete because it is grounded in materialism; one cannot "make some mind of what was only sense."

More evidence that the positivistic observationalism regarding phenomena is incomplete stemmed from the growing awareness, beginning in the 1820's, that because the universe has more than three dimensions, it does not operate solely according to the rules of Euclidean geometry. The most troublesome contention of non-Euclidean geometry is that it is impossible for us to see the geometry of the space-time continuum because it is multi-dimensional, whereas our sensory experience remains limited to three dimensions; thus, however tenaciously our minds may cling to the idea of a three-dimensional world, we live in a multi-dimensional world.^[41] The ultimate implication of this contention is that human life is too complex to be captured merely in terms of sensory experience.

Perhaps Nemerov's mad king, in "Runes," is, fictively speaking, the earliest representation of the inability of Euclidean geometry to accommodate human experience. The king thinks his thoughts in "regular hexagons, each one unlike/ Each of the others." His world of ice and snow is highly ordered, yet it does not incorporate the extrasensory elements of human experience.

Similarly, in "Death and the Maiden," a man's fatal fall from a tree corresponds to the death of a tradition grounded in "some Euclidean ancestor's dream about the truth." The "maiden," now an old woman, witnesses the tragedy from her upper window. Like Faulkner's Miss Emily, she is dominated by her father and the past, cut off from the modern world and seemingly impervious to change. Even Nemerov's term for her, "maiden" is antiquated and inappropriate. She smugly clings to her father's outdated teachings, representing the Victorian era's ready acceptance of the permanence and infallibility of a whole body of scientific thought. At the end of "Death and the Maiden," Nemerov clearly describes the fate of this "maiden," yet she obviously does not recognize herself as the subject of her own vision:

. . . when I remember

my father's house, I imagine sometimes

a dry, ruined spinster at my rainy window

trying to tally on dumb fingers a world's

incredible damage-- nothing can stand it!-- and

watching the red shirt patched against the sky,

so far and small in the webbed hand of the elm.

While many scientists were pessimistic about the outcome of this admission of uncertainty (e.g., Morris Kline's The Loss of Certainty), Alfred North Whitehead formulated a theory that was diametrically opposed to the positivist assumption that mind was dependent on and at root inseparable from physical nature. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead demonstrates how principles of the New Physics "strike a heavy blow at the foundations of classical scientific materialism." The theory of the relativity of time and space, for example, contradicts positivism's insistence on "a definite present instant at which all matter is simultaneously real." Whitehead rejects the premise of scientific materialism, because it "presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter. . .  spread throughout space in a flux of configurations"; he insists that such matter "is senseless, valueless, purposeless," and that scientists therefore must challenge the claims of scientific materialism.^[42]

Similarly, Nemerov's poem, "The Place of Value," is an attempt to reconcile the discoveries of post-Newtonian science with philosophy's eternal quest for meaning. The poem takes its title from Wolfgang Kohler's 1938 lecture series at Harvard (which Nemerov heard while a freshman there), published later as The Place of Value in a World of Facts, in which Kohler examines the claim that, "science is impotent wherever it comes near the essential problems of mankind, or else, where it does try to handle human affairs, it tends to distort their very nature."^[43] In the poem, Nemerov offers a synopsis of the history of science, tracing it from its origins to the present time, in which humanity must either,

. . . face the neurosis

Of the continual choice on which

All depends; or play the hopeless 

Shell game against the cheerful

Healthy statistician, who knows

"Pretty well" the final result.

In other words, the choice is between Nature, whose complexity we cannot hope to comprehend ("your utterance is riddled," as Nemerov writes in "Runes"), and the mathematical representation of Nature, which at best is oversimplified and therefore inaccurate.

In the course of describing the man named Maclane, Nemerov states that,

The "place of value in

A world of fact" is to supply

Cohesiveness, weight, stability,

And to give reason and point

To the particular screams

Which otherwise merely would 

Echo between empty buildings

Or make bubbles in the water.

"Cohesiveness, stability and weight" are reminiscent of Locke's "primary qualities"--qualities that ostensibly existed apart from human perception. But in "Poetry and Meaning," Nemerov reveals his own reservations about the traditional distinction between primary and secondary qualities:

This distinction of the whole world into subjective and objective probably began with Galileo's, and then Locke's, division of the qualities into primary and secondary. The dictionary gives the former as bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion or rest, `which are in the object as in our perception of it,' while the secondary qualities, tastes, sounds, colors, and so on, `are modes of our perception induced by some character in the object which does not coincide with the perception itself.' One notices immediately that the primary qualities have the air of being what are called "hard facts," while the secondary are already a touch sentimental and unmanly. And the scientific way of developing this distinction had the effect of progressively reducing even the primary qualities to quantity, or number, alone, so that only what is enumerable is effectively regarded as real. . . . Poetry, and literature generally, may be the last remaining place where that assumption about subjective and objective does not apply. . . . ^[44]

Hence, the "empty buildings" and "bubbles in the water" in lines 25 and 26 of "The Place of Value" can be interpreted as symbols of the futility of the positivist interpretation of phenomena: by excluding all but "hard facts," positivism sharply reduces the value of human life by denying the real significance of the man's dying screams.

After describing the execution, Nemerov turns his attention to the scene of Maclane's death, where, "The Septentrion shines high/ In cold, temporal distance." He thus incorporates two radically different views of nature--ancient Greek mythology and modern science. The "Septentrion" are the seven stars of Ursa Major or Minor, which represented for the ancient Greeks seven plow oxen. This allusion recalls a time when the ancient Greeks attributed the acts of nature to the arbitrary will of gods who could be propitiated only be prayers, sacrifices and other rituals. The Ionian philosophers, however, discarded older, largely mythical accounts and substituted materialistic and objective explanations of design and operation of the universe. 

By the same token, "Cold temporal distance" briefly summarizes Einstein's space-time continuum, as well as his belief that scientific truth must be conceived as valid apart from human perception, thus "cold." Einstein responded to the possibility that reality could be governed by chance by saying that, "God does not play dice." ^[45]

Throughout "The Place of Value," Nemerov prefers Kohler's view to Einstein's. Kohler's role in the development of Gestalt psychology clearly indicates his radical departure from Einstein's physics. In short, Gestalt psychology emphasizes that the attributes of any whole cannot be deduced from analyzing its parts in isolation. While other psychologists had ignored questions of form, meaning and value, Gestalt psychology seeks to determine the relation between physical processes and perception.

Gestalt psychologists frequently relied on various visual illusions to illustrate the dynamic relation between observer and observed. Nemerov's own fascination with the visual illusions of Magritte and Escher is due to his belief in their capacity to illustrate the true nature of reality. For example, one of the Escher sketches described in Nemerov's essay, "Maurits Cornelius Escher," relies on the same principle as one of the most famous visual illusions, the Moebius band. Although initially appearing to have two sides, the Moebius band, upon closer inspection, has only one; it is thus a particularly apt representation of the relation between inside and out, observer and observed.

Nemerov returns to the principle of the Moebius band in his poem, "Creation Myth on a Moebius Band":

The world's just mad enough to have been made

By the Being his beings into Being prayed.

In the poem, "Being" functions as both noun and verb, thing and process. Nemerov's use of various forms of being emphasizes that thought and thing, observer and observed, are interdependent. In much the same way, David Bohm discusses the origin of the word, "reality": "This comes from the Latin `res,' which means `thing'. . . . `res' comes from the verb `reri,' meaning `to think,' so that literally, `res' is `what is thought about.'" Thus, Bohm concludes that, "the `real thing' is limited by conditions that can be expressed in terms of thought." Furthermore, Bohm writes, "If the thing and the thought about it have their ground in the one undefinable and unknown totality of flux, then the attempt to explain their relationship by supposing that thought is in reflective correspondence with the thing has no meaning, for both thought and thing are forms abstracted from the total process."^[46] In The Shield of Elohim (1950), Hyatt Waggoner makes an analogous point: "If a scientific civilization is to be a good civilization, it is necessary that increase in knowledge should be accompanied by increase in wisdom. I mean by wisdom a right conception of the ends of life. This is something that science in itself does not provide."^[47]

Like Hyatt Waggoner, Howard Nemerov wishes to find a proper relationship between science and poetry. And like I. A. Richards in Science and Poetry, he seems to have the uneasy sense that poetry cannot continue to survive unless the value of science is recognized by poets. Barfield contends that we should explore science as more than "dashboard knowledge," (knowing how to run a car without understanding how it works) by seeking the immaterial agency in nature itself. Should we refuse to do so, by imagining that phenomena really are independent of our perception, they become idols that undermine our belief that there are values beyond those dictated by material existence. After learning to place science within a broader context, however, we are better able to comprehend the truths that it offers, but science is ultimately a very crucial aspect of the more comprehensive truth of our collective experience.