
SESSION 1903-4. 
RI 
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15TH, 1903, 
Che Relationship betiveen Povirpy 
and Srience. 
BY 
Tue Rev, FELIX ASHER 
(Vicar of Holy Trinity, Ship Street, Brighton). 
ae is apparently truer and more permanent than poetry, 
for it deals with facts as they are; the poet allows the facts 
to be transformed by a medium of feeling. Science again appears 
to see the present actual world, while poetry lives, often, by 
contemplating the beauty of an ever-receding past. Yet, if we 
turn to concrete poems like Tennyson’s ‘ Break, Break, Break,” 
we find our assumption hardly holds good. The poem written 
between 1830-1840 is much fresher to-day than the science of 
that period. A stanza of Gray’s Elegy touches our emotions now, 
but who would learn of the science of the 18th century? The 
greatest poet of all—Shakespeare—lived when science was hardly 
born and his voice is as clear as ever, while we ignore the 
scientific glimmerings of his day. All this goes to show that 
poetry, once created, lives on unchanged, while a phase of 
scientific thought, however accurate, lasts but a short time and is 
merged in the complete synthesis which follows it. 
Again, the poet ‘sees into the life of things.” He is not 
content, like the scientist, to abstract certain features of living or 
dead phenomena, and formulate the connexions between such 
abstractions; the poet penetrates to the essential nature, the deep 
mysterious throb of life which animates each separate thing and 
the whole universe in which it finds itself. The scientist describes 
things and maps the world out for us; the poet explains their 
being and their end and gives us, in song, the joy which he feels 
at his discovery. The scientist brings his message of the external 
