Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and science

is simply incommensurable with the rationalist post-Enlightenment cos-
mology of modern science: the superstition and myth of this Christian
cosmology is banished by the rule of "unalterable law." "Lucifer in Star-
light" is an approving allegory that upholds science's disenchantment of the
natural world.
Meredith's poem carefully extricates the scientific understanding of the
starry heavens from the conclusions drawn by natural theology. The
sublime prospect of the stars at night provided Paley and his followers with
their most enduring ground. As late as 1888, the Encyclopaedia Britannica
asserted: "'God's glory in the heavens' ... is in some degree visible to the
naked eye and uninstructed intellect, but it becomes more perceptible and
more impressive with every discovery of astronomy." 15 While develop-
ments in the biological sciences had radically undermined a large part of
natural theology's territory, astronomy could still be called upon to sustain
it. But in Meredith's poem the regularities of the heavenly world represent
not the mind of God, as they did in Pythagorean and Newtonian traditions,
but "the brain of heaven."

The advent from mid-century of the reductionist science of neurophy-
siology effectively attacked the metaphysical and theological principles of
mind and soul by locating the seat of human rationality and individual
identity in the physical organ of the brain. Throughout Principles of
Psychology (1855), Herbert Spencer argued that this material basis for
thought was the product of evolution: a hypothesis that gained credibility
during the following decades through the work of Darwin and Huxley,
among others. Meredith expounds a version of this evolutionary under-
standing in some of the companion poems to "Lucifer in Starlight," such as
"The Woods of the Westermain" (1883): "Each of each in sequent birth, /
Blood and brain and spirit" (GM 169-70). By describing the stars as "the
brain of heaven," Meredith does not simply import a principle of materi-
alist science into what had been traditionally regarded as the metaphysical,
theological and poetic realm of the heavens. He also implies an under-
standing of the universe according to the nebular hypothesis and other
developmentalist theories.

Lucifer's acquiescence to the universe of "unalterable law" marks his
demythologization. The conceit by which "he looked, and sank" plays on
the meaning of the devil's title of Lucifer, which derives from Isaiah 14: 12:
"How you are fallen from heaven, / O Day Star, son of Dawn!'" Lucifer is a
name for the morning (or day) star, the planet Venus, which appears daily
just before sunrise like a bright star and once every eight years in its transit
across the face of the sun as a dark circle, "the black planet" (8). Rather
like Bunbury in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), whom

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