On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Magick of true Reason’s Light,
    He chac’d out of our sight,
    Nor suffer’d Living men to be misled
    By the vain shadows of the Dead:
    To graves, from whence it rose, the conquer’d Phantome fled;
    He broke that Monstrous God which stood
    In midst of th’Orchard, and the whole did claim,
    Which with a useless Sith of Wood,
    And something else not worth a name,
    (Both vast for shew, yet neither fit
    Or to defend or to Beget;
    Ridiculous and Senceless Terrors!) made
    Children and superstitious Men afraid.
    The Orchard’s open now, and free;
    Bacon has broke that Scar-crow Deitie.
    Cowley’s praise of Bacon is based on Lucretius’ praise of Epicurus in 1. 62–79:
        When human life lay foul for all to see
    Upon the earth, crushed by the burden of religion,
    Religion which from heaven’s firmament
    Displayed its face, its ghastly countenance,
    Lowering above mankind, the first who dared
    Raise mortal eyes against it, first to take
    His stand against it, was a man of Greece.
    He was not cowed by fables of the gods
    Or thunderbolts or heaven’s threatening roar,
    But they the more spurred on his ardent soul
    Yearning to be the first to break apart
    The bolts of nature’s gates and throw them open.
    The heroism of this revolt in the name of earth and humanity against the empty tyranny of the gods goes closely in
On the Nature of the Universe
with Lucretius’ poetic empiricism, which constantly recalls us from the mists and darkness of false belief to the plain light of scientific reasoning. Poet and philosopher/scientist unite in inviting us simply to use our eyes and see the world for what it is, to
see through
the ‘words | Of terror from the priests’ (1. 103). It is the enlightenment rhetoric of a Voltaire, echoed in modern times by scientists like Richard Dawkins: a recall from flights of fancy to what Epicurus called ‘sober reckoning’, to the
nature of things
.
    And yet the very terms in which this revolt is celebrated so powerfully must give us pause for thought. What attracts us to the assault on myth in
On the Nature of the Universe
, the great Enlightenment project of freeing humanity from delusion, attracts because of its own mythical form: at its heart are those images of Nature unchained, of the hero Epicurus challenging heaven and bringing back victory over it.
    The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
    Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
    Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
    Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
    Over himself…
    as the Platonist Shelley put it in a passage of
Prometheus Unbound
full of Lucretian echoes. This sort of rhetoric is not sober reckoning, but an inspiring call to liberation whose efficacy depends on means denied by the scientism it champions. Epicurus said that the only virtue of style was clarity, and the rhetoric of
On the Nature of the Universe
endorses this view of language as ideally a transparent window onto reality. If we can but drain language of its false accretions and get back to the plain sense of words, then we can have access to the way things are. But the poem does not just tell it as it is, but constructs a complex world of images and metaphors which refutes this naïve view of language as merely a window on truth. What we buy into when we endorse this grand vision of the triumph of reason is a construction in language whose appeal is entirely due to its linguistic richness—the linguistic richness that ironically the underlying theory cannot accommodate.
On the Nature of the Universe
isa complex statement of the simplicity of things, and the tension between those two drives is not—and cannot be—resolved within the poem.
    One particular aspect of this contrast which has always seemed strange to readers is the presence in the poem of figures such as the personified Nature, Mother Earth, and especially Venus, as invoked at the opening of the poem:
        O mother of the Roman race, delight
    Of men and gods, Venus most