At the end of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin famously declares ‘There is grandeur in this view of life’ ([1859] 2003: 398). Tennyson and Meredith surely bear this out in their poems. But the poetry of Darwinism yields us more than grandeur alone. It brings into focus the spiritual, moral and psychological questions that the Darwinian condition forces us to ask. Through poetry, we can confront what it might mean to live in a purely material universe, if that is indeed the fate to which Darwinism consigns us. We can probe our own need for spiritual comfort and consolation and explore how that need might be answered within the Darwinian universe, whether by God or without him. We can enlarge too our sense of how, in Philip Appleman's words, ‘to be, / knee-deep in these rivers of innocent blood, / a decent animal’ (‘The Voyage Home’, v, ll. 42–4). We can reach across the divide that separates us from other animals. We can even hold science itself to account.

I want to close this book with one last poem that encapsulates the function of poetry in the Darwinian age.