At the heart of Robert Duncan's first great serial poem, The Opening of the Field (1960), is a fourfold lyric entitled ‘Four Pictures of the Real Universe’. The poem strives to make mythic sense of the heat death of the universe, ‘the death of stars’ and ‘emanations out of light perishing’. The second verse reads as follows:

The universe's procreant urge is configured as a Beast of sound, whose ‘roar’ is not unlike cosmic radiation penetrating every wall, making everything immanent to it, but which we cannot hear, only ‘see as white flowers’. The tune is taken up again in the final verse:

The Pythagorean music of the spheres persists, via Duncan's mythography, even into the age of the Big Bang, where the ‘cosmic hum’ of interstellar space was just then being taken as a sign of the infinite universe's singular origins. In 1947 George Gamow and Ralph Alpher had speculated that ‘the existence of galactic background radiation [was] a remnant of that initially stupendous detonation of what [he] called “ylem”, matter-in-readiness, and what Lemaître called “l'atome primitif” (these days, a “singularity”)’. But this speculated sound would not actually be heard, and then only by machines, until 1964, four years after Duncan's poem was published, ‘when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs in Holmdel confronted a faint, ineliminable noise in the “ultra-sensitive microwave receiving system” of their radio-telescope’, a dim ‘fossil whisper’ of creation, or ‘outfoldings of sound from the seed of first light’ (825).