TECHNICAL NOTE: The great majority of the links below are to
scanned antique books at the Internet Archive, most of them
anthologies. Poems frequently run for several pages; when coming
to the apparent end of a poem, turn the page to make sure!
Chemistry ---
Atoms ---
Chemists
---
Back to Main Subject Index
- CHEMISTRY and MATERIALS SCIENCE:
See also Atoms.
Comic poem from the dawn of the age of biochemistry. Signed "H.W."
Anonymous:
An Appeal for Air
Modern readers, unlike Nineteenth Century ones, would probably find this
poem funnier if it weren't written in rustic dialect.
Anonymous:
The Chemist to His Love
Anonymous:
A jolly young chemistry tough
Anonymous:
Ozone.
Still accented on the last syllable in Nineteenth Century English.
Browning, Robert:
The Laboratory
A lady goes to a chemist to buy some poison.
Davidson, John:
Snow Looking at ice crystals under the microscope inspires
the poet to consider how infinite complexity can arise from
simple geometry.
Dixon, Richard Watson:
Dust and Wind
Meaning matter and soul. "Canst thou, oh atom, tell ... why after losing thee the form
remained the same?"
Duganne, Augustine:
Injuresoul: A Satire for Science
The title refers to the famous agnostic Robert Ingersoll, but the poem also attacks
Darwinism, mainstream science, and rationalism in general. Duganne's endnotes
present his own extremely unorthodox, vaguely alchemical "scientific" theories,
which he intends to be more compatible with Christianity: "Nitrogen,
hydrogen, and oxygen ... eliminate those three gases ...
and we should again breathe the air Adam breathed in
Eden."
Fitzpatrick, Patrick Vincent:
Gas Antiphlogistic:
From Thaumaturgus. See also the next poem, 'Del Volo'.
Havergal, Frances Ridley:
Enigma No. 16
The gaseous state of matter.
Hunt, Leigh:
Alter et Idem: A Chemico-Poetical Thought
Everything, including lovers' tears etc., is made of the same elements.
Masters, Edgar Lee:
Trainor, the Druggist: Chemistry as psychological metaphor.
SCIENTISTS: Chemists and Chemical Physicists
- Anonymous:
Davy vs. Baryt "Baryt" is barium hydroxide; Humphrey Davy's
contemporaries believed his health problems were caused by exposure to it in his
research.
- Bentley, Edmund Clerihew:
Sir Humphrey Davy
The very first clerihew to be written.
- Thompson, Francis:
The Nineteenth Century
The century of Science, war, imperialism, etc. Will the Twentieth be better? Mentions Davy and Faraday.
- Bentley, Edmund Clerihew:
Professor James Dewar
Sometimes attributed to Bentley's
colleague G. K. Chesterton.
- Barbauld, Anna Lætitia:
Champion of Truth.
To a Romantic scientific genius: "While thy praises
through wide realms extend, we sit in shades, and mourn
the absent friend."
- Barbauld, Anna Lætitia:
To Dr. Priestley, December 29, 1792.
Priestley -- a supporter of the French Revolution -- escaped from
England to the US after "Church-and-King" mobs burnt down his home
and the Unitarian meeting-house in Birmingham.
- Barbauld, Anna Lætitia:
An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley's Study.
- Barbauld, Anna Lætitia:
The Mouse's Petition.
"Found in the trap where he had been confined all night
by Dr. Priestley, for the sake of making experiments
with different kinds of air."
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor:
Priestley
- Freneau, Philip Morin:
To a Persecuted Philosopher
Probably meaning Joseph
Priestley.
- Maxwell, James Clerk:
(Cat's) Cradle Song, by a Babe in Knots
About
Lord Kelvin in his vortex-atom knot-theorist
incarnation.
