For better or for worse

In his recent poem ‘Darwin in the Galapagos’ from his sequence ‘Planet Wave’, Edwin Morgan conjures up the image of the air bright with Darwin's finches – ‘well, bright and dark’ (l. 9). For Morgan himself, Darwin's revelation of life as a gorgeous evolutionary process is indeed bright. As his Darwin remarks,

For others, however, Darwin is the prophet of nothing more than ‘the universe's grand indifference’, as Amy Clampitt puts it in ‘A Curfew’ (l. 42). In ‘Camouflage’, Clampitt asks herself why a killdeer (a common North American plover) tries to distract her away from its eggs by feigning injury. Her reply is telling:

‘It's / too much like us’ (ll. 41–2), Clampitt adds, in a wry inversion of the argument that it is God who is a projection of human characteristics onto an inhuman nature. Whether Darwinism disturbs us because the nature it reveals is too like us or too alien – whether, to borrow from Wilde, we suffer from the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass, or the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in the glass – either way, it can seem appalling (1966: 16).