How to Bag A Jabberwock

William Empson provocatively dubbed John Donne a ‘space man’ in his second major essay on the Renaissance poet, establishing science fiction credentials for a writer who, Empson maintained, was ‘interested in getting to another planet much as the kids are nowadays’ (1993a, 78). ‘Donne the Space Man’ appeared in John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review in the summer of 1957, a few months before the launch of Sputnik 1 on 4 October. Empson’s argument was that Donne ‘brought the idea [of space travel] into practically all his best love-poems, with the sentiment which it still carries of adventurous freedom’, and that ‘coming soon after Copernicus and Bruno’ this was a defiance of Christian doctrine, since it meant ‘denying the uniqueness of Jesus’ (78–79). If there can be life on other planets, there must be a separate Jesus for each world, and Donne’s references to the holiness of his beloved, coupled with imagery of new lands and spheres, are subversive. A reading that failed to take Donne’s interest in speculative astronomy seriously was, according to Empson, one that risked allowing his love poems to appear merely smutty, so that establishing Donne’s heresy and his respect for female interlocutors became one and the same endeavour. The use of the term ‘space man’ by the twentieth-century critic was a radical humanist gesture, asserting a major preoccupation of science fiction – life on other worlds – against a literary critical establishment that he found loaded with oppressive Christian values.

Empson set out to imitate Donne in his own early verses (see Haffenden, 2005, 358–70), testing the new sciences of the early twentieth century to see what resources they might offer the adventurous lover. These experiments were suffused with two other profound influences, one acknowledged and the other tacit. Opening his contribution to a festschrift for T. S. Eliot, published in 1948, Empson demurred at trying ‘to judge or define’ Eliot’s achievement: ‘I feel, like most other verse writers of my generation, that I do not know for certain how much of my own mind he invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He has a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike an east wind’ (1987, 361). Before Eliot or Donne had begun to work on the young poet’s mind, however, he must have been reading H. G. Wells, sucking up late Victorian and Edwardian scientific romances like any other schoolboy of the 1910s and ’20s. During the General Strike, at nineteen years of age, Empson felt he had suddenly walked into a scene from The Sleeper Awakes (a 1910 revision of Wells’s 1899 novel When the Sleeper Wakes). His undergraduate verses are underpinned by Wellsian perspectives on space travel and alien life, from the Time Traveller’s vertiginous journey in ‘Camping Out’ to the desperation of a dying planet in ‘Earth Has Shrunk in the Wash’.

As he worked, almost thirty years later, through drafts of ‘Donne the Space Man’, Empson championed Wells for his foresight, elevating him above Donne in this regard, and needling Eliot for a prim antipathy towards visionary science fiction. These remarks were left out of the printed essay: Empson or his editor must have realised that such provocations could not help the case for Donne. I have discussed the excised remarks, along with the younger Empson’s Sleeper Awakes revelation, in a commentary on his most impassioned science fiction poem, ‘Letter I’ (see Price, 2012). Here my aim is to dig deeper into the service performed by Wellsian themes for Empson as a poet. If Eliot’s bleak outlook on modern city life was an ‘east wind’ to seek shelter from, what comfort (or added discomfort) did he derive from The First Men in the Moon (1901) or The War of the Worlds (1898), for instance? What happens if we do to Empson what he did to Donne: take space travel seriously in his poems, as an aesthetic and moral imperative? By exploring these questions I hope to show that the early poems and later criticism were part of a continuous project for Empson. The answers should also add to our knowledge of what poetry can do for science in culture, and vice versa.

Amid the shock of confrontation with alien life, the Edwardian adventurer will invariably think of ants. According to Charlotte Sleigh, ‘ants […] were an object of keen scrutiny during the twentieth century, equally provoking fascination and contempt’ (2007, 219). This tension is dramatised by Wells in The First Men in the Moon, through the scientist Cavor, who wishes to study and learn from the Selenites, and the businessman Bedford, who plans to overthrow them and remove their gold. Michael J. Crowe (1986, 396, 467) notes that ant-like extraterrestrials had been proposed by Francis Galton in 1896 and Edwin Mason in 1898, and Wells has Cavor relay such conjectures to Bedford prior to their arrival on the satellite. The first alien sighted by the adventurers appears ‘a trivial being, a mere ant, scarcely five feet high […] a compact, bristling creature, having much of the quality of a complicated insect’ (Wells, 1901, 117–18). Cavor’s interest in an exchange is dismissed by his companion: ‘They’re much more like ants on their hind legs than human beings, and who ever got to any sort of understanding with ants?’ (146).

Revulsion and curiosity shape the entire narrative, as each character experiences a shift in attitude towards the ant-like aliens. Bedford’s violence and his dreams of economic exploitation yield to a ‘sense of the earth’s littleness and the infinite littleness of my life upon it’ (244) during his solo return to earth in Cavor’s anti-gravity sphere. His self-confidence shaken, he perceives his existence ‘very much as one might review the proceedings of an ant in the sand’ (245). As Patrick Parrinder has observed, the novel’s ‘satirical ambiguity […] is evident from the fact that both Bedford’s commercial fantasy and the ant-hill state of the Selenites approximate to the world government of which Wells himself dreamed – yet they are also deeply and intentionally repugnant’ (1995, 77). This biting ambiguity is also applied through Cavor, who, left behind on the moon, encounters disturbing scenes from ant society when he stumbles across young ants destined for menial work having their forelimbs nourished while their bodies are compressed, and subsequently discovers workers drugged into oblivion between sessions of labour. The scientist talks himself into a more rational response, remarking upon the ‘far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them’, and musing that ‘to drug the worker that one does not want and toss him aside is surely far better than to expel him from his factory to wander starving in the streets’ (Wells, 1901, 310–13). Fiction allowed Wells to see all round his convictions about science and society with a flexibility that is much harder to maintain in an essay or treatise.

Empson’s poem ‘The Ants’, first published as ‘Sonnet’ in the Cambridge Review on 27 April 1928, appears on the face of it hardly concerned with Wellsian fantasy. Set resolutely on earth (there is enthusiastic talk of space travel in several poems written about the same time), it compares the underground life of ants to a prospective love affair that doesn’t take off. The love theme is doubly disguised or displaced: syntactically by the adoption of a plural voice, and structurally by an intervening analogy of underground trains. Diction is basic, with words of only one or two syllables. Together with a preponderance of end-punctuation, the spoken effect hints at massed automata (inspired, perhaps, by Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’). The octet’s rhyme scheme underlines a self-contained existence, about to be broken by emergence into the wider air.

We tunnel through your noonday out to you.

We carry our tube’s narrow darkness there

Where, nostrum-plastered, with prepared air,

With old men running and trains whining through

We ants may tap your aphids for your dew.

You may not wish their sucking or our care;

Our all-but freedom, too, your branch must bear,

High as roots’ depth in earth, all earth to view.

The opening line holds perplexity at bay with straightforward syntax, while end-stopping gives it the air of a simple, direct statement. But uncertainties frame the poem with a sense of partial translation, a difference between how ‘you’ might use and experience ‘noonday’ and how I (or we) attempt to understand this, implying a gulf between two worlds of experience even as tentative contact is being established (on ‘noonday’, see Wain, 1978, 178–79). As Empson explained to a friend many years later, ‘it occurred to me that the queer habits of these ants were like an unsatisfactory love-affair with a person revered but not understood’ (2000, 155).

Reverence without understanding was a widespread syndrome among interwar consumers of popular science, as ever more specialised forms of knowledge and dazzling speculation were incorporated into this flourishing industry. Empson was particularly sensitive to gulfs in meaning that had been papered over with colourful expository prose, leaving the reader with a sense of awe at some feat of nature against which human activity appeared fraught, blind and blundering. Whether the natural or physical world could really be understood on human terms was a question that energised all of his early poetry. In a Granta review of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the White Ant (1927), Empson praised the populariser’s work in ‘digesting the discoveries of the scientists into an emotionally available form’, but felt that ‘the work itself calls for a more desperate effort of the imagination’ (1993b, 23). Popular science was not a finished product but a preliminary accomplishment, inspiring further workers to test and exploit its reflections on human existence. Empson’s undergraduate verses, published in Cambridge university magazines for a mixed audience of science and humanities scholars, are committed to this ‘more desperate effort’.

Maeterlinck’s white ants (termites, Isoptera) have been conflated with ants (Hymenoptera) in Empson’s poem, producing a science-fictional creature to test the suggestion that ‘the fate of these insects prefigures our own’ (Maeterlinck, 1927, 168). Further sources are brought in, particularly Social Life Among the Insects (1923) by American entomologist William Morton Wheeler. Wheeler draws a contrast between the terrestrial life of ants, building their ‘galleries or chambers in the soil or dead wood’, and the aerial existence of bees, ‘the vertiginous journeys far from real bodies, the instability, the wandering about, the forgetfulness of things and of oneself’ (Wheeler, 1923, 153, quoting Espinas, Des Societes Animales (1877)). Placing the insects of his poem within tubes yet up a tree, Empson combines the termite habit of creating ‘long subterranean or tubular passages’ (Maeterlinck, 1927, 152) with a step towards the perils of aerial existence. The result is a tight manifesto for insect civilisation, ‘a splendidly animated picture of ant activity’ (Wain, 1978, 179), finely balanced between safety and suffocation. The ‘nostrum’ applied to every situation faced by termites (including the walls, which are literally plastered with it) is excrement, while ‘prepared air’ obviates the need for any contact with the outside world. (Empson would return to the termite city with its concrete excrement in the final stanza of ‘High Dive’.) As Maeterlinck explains, ‘the slightest crevices are jealously guarded, particularly those that serve the air chimneys: for the ventilation of the termitary is assured by a circulation of air with which our most expert hygienists could find no fault’ (1927, 84–85).

‘We ants may tap your aphids for your dew’: Wheeler’s account of the relationship between ants and sap-sucking plant parasites lends menace to the octet’s calm diction of ‘care’, ‘sucking’ and ‘freedom’. (See Gardner and Gardner, 1978, 39, and Empson, 2000, 157, on Wheeler as a source for these lines.) Wheeler describes how these parasites ‘live gregariously on the surfaces of plants’, sucking up cane sugar, which they break down into invert sugar, made available as ‘excrement, or honey-dew’. ‘Many species of ants’, Wheeler notes, ‘have learned how to induce’ these parasites ‘to void the honey-dew by stroking them with the antennae’. They ‘protect and care for them’, even keeping them in ‘specially constructed shelters or barns’, while some will ‘actually collect their eggs in the fall, keep them in the nests over winter and in the spring distribute the hatching young over the surface of the plants’, resulting in ‘considerable damage’ to fruit trees and crops (Wheeler, 1923, 178). Such power comes at a price, however: as Maeterlinck puts it, the insect city ‘pursues in obscurity its miserly, sordid and monotonous existence’, populated by ‘dismal prisoners who never saw and never will see the light of day’ (Maeterlinck, 1927, 107). The confident imperialism of Empson’s octet is ready to be turned inside out, hinging on a visual comparison between the highest branch and the deepest root.

There are, however, two contrasting ways to experience this shift, depending on the extent to which extraterrestrials are allowed into the poem. The link between ants and underground trains seems strained, until we allow the Wellsian preoccupation with future humans to resonate with Maeterlinck’s conjecture that ‘cities of insects […] might almost serve as a caricature of ourselves, as a travesty of the earthly paradise to which most civilised peoples are tending’ (1927, 164). In The Time Machine (1895), Morlock life is immediately understood in terms of London’s mid-Victorian transport solution (Wells, 1995, 43–44). Exploring future London in The Sleeper Awakes, Graham finds the roadway passing through a tunnel where ‘big-wheeled machines’ drive ‘noiselessly and swiftly’ on double tracks (1910, 238). Nearing the factory quarters he witnesses ‘great and dusty galleries’ filled with Labour Department workers in blue overalls, overseen by Labour Police in orange. The workers have ‘pinched faces […] feeble muscles, and weary eyes’, and are reduced to ant-like specialism of function: ‘The latter-day labourer, male as well as female, was essentially a machine-minder and feeder, a servant and attendant, or an artist under direction’ (239). The satire of The First Men in the Moon, in which Cavor finds ingenious Selenite improvements in the treatment of mechanical labour, had not yet found its bite in 1899, when Wells penned these lines (unchanged from When the Sleeper Wakes). Satirical or not, the underground life of insect-men was a ready fin-de-siècle symbol for conflict between faith in social progress and fear of a machine society, famously recapitulated in 1927 in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. (Empson, 1993b, 50, takes Wells to task for his criticism of this film.)

Empson himself described his poem (many years later) as following ‘the assumption of Eliot that city life is very bad’ (2000, 155). The ghostly, automaton-like commuters in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ could not have been far from any dystopian poet’s mind at this time:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
(ll. 62–65)

As Cecil D. Eby (1987, 42–43) has observed, these lines recall the conclusion of The War of the Worlds. Once the Martians have perished and the exiled masses have returned, the narrator finds himself unable to forget all that he has witnessed: ‘I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body’ (Wells, 1898, 302). In a prefiguring of Bedford’s epiphany in The First Men in the Moon, the chronicler of the Martian attack perceives the weakness of civilisation after hearing his race as a whole compared to ants by the artilleryman (254; see also 100 for the introduction of humans as ants).

Empson’s sonnet is pervaded by a Wellsian sense of mankind’s power and vulnerability, and the promised panoramic view leads inevitably into the sestet’s verdict:

No, by too much this station the air nears.

How small a chink lets in how dire a foe.

What though the garden in one glance appears?

Winter will come and all her leaves will go.

We do not know what skeleton endures.

Carry at least her parasites below.

The octet’s assured, programmatic ‘we’ addressing ‘you’ has reduced to a single declaration of precarious unknowing. End-punctuation now enacts uncompromising self-curtailment. ‘Station’ refers us back to line four, with ‘old men running and trains whining through’. The subterranean workers (looking ancient with ‘pinched faces […] feeble muscles, and weary eyes’) may simply be in a rush, or perhaps they are shifted around like cargo on a network of escalators (in The Sleeper Awakes, transport around the city consists of moving platforms called ‘running ways’). Expansion of the underground network risks making the whole system vulnerable, while the ‘foe’ capable of entering by small chinks is left vague: it might be the outside air, or sunlight, or some rival insect – what matters is the sense of threat, rather than a specific menace. A thorough pessimism diminishes the promised garden, for it will become bare and inhospitable in winter, while uncertainty over ‘what skeleton endures’ adds a histrionic note, invoking the excessively long time scales of archaeology. ‘Carry at least her parasites below’: the insects retreat underground with a ranch of fat aphids, perhaps planning to live off the roots – a safer, yet ultimately more destructive, policy. A sense of relief and compassion is insinuated by including slightly longer words in the last two lines, a last flicker of humanity as the automata retreat. There is a private joke at the end, for Empson was interested in voyeuristic and vicarious relationships, where a thwarted lover might get pleasure from observing another’s success (see Haffenden, 2005, 117, and 2006, 388–92). Seduction of the rival, tapping this ‘parasite’, is itself a parasitical activity likely to cut off the ultimate source of honey-dew.

This is about as much as can be milked from the poem as confined to terrestrial experience. Under such a reading the sonnet fizzles out, failing to live up to the proposed analogy between a love affair and insect behaviour. Empson’s original impulse when drafting the poem was to express fear of intimacy, and critics have found this theme a helpful key to the tree and garden imagery. Christopher Ricks (1974, 183–84) sees the tree standing for woman’s fearful power of begetting life, while the ants make a travesty of the womb in their galleries. Following Empson’s own comment from a letter of 1957 that ‘the woman’s mind and sympathies are the open air, and seem unmeritable, even if safe to reach, so that the lover is like city workers in their tube’, Haffenden (2005, 123–24) finds that the poem ‘ironically compliments woman as denizen of daylight and the natural order, while man – inhumed in his anxiously defended world – shrinks from what she represents into his sublimating regimen’. A further clue is offered in Haffenden’s notes to ‘The Ants’ (Empson, 2000, 157), which cite the Freudian reading of ‘garden’ in Empson’s 1935 essay on Alice in Wonderland: ‘Alice peering through the hole into the garden may be wanting a return to the womb as well as an escape from it; she is fond, we are told, of taking both sides of an argument when talking to herself, and the whole book balances between the luscious nonsense-world of fantasy and the ironic nonsense-world of fact’ (1995, 216–17). The inverse of Alice, these ants are afraid at once of a return to the womb and of being born (and consequently growing up), preferring a shut-up place of the kind that Alice is forever outgrowing and escaping from. Empson had not worked out the details of this argument in 1928 when writing ‘The Ants’, but the thematics were already in place from his reading of Freud and the Alice books, and would have helped to console him for the romantic failure.

The sonnet, however, is not content to rest in Freudian territory, having other ideas, hinted at in the same letter of 1957:

The ants’ tunnels are compared to the London Underground, which has advertisements for patent medicines on the walls and a special ventilation system.[…] The subject of nears could equally well be station or air, since AB = BA, but the tube station we have now reached is too close to the dangerous surface of the planet. Surely the pity is felt quite as much for men as for ants. (Empson, 2000, 155)

As Empson wrote in his review of Maeterlinck, the populariser’s depiction of ‘vivid but unrelieved horror’ in the insect world is misdirected, for ‘capable creatures of wide initiative do not usually think of themselves like that’ (1993b, 24). If these creatures represent a vision of our future society, then the ‘more desperate effort’ called for is clear: ‘If someone observed us, as obscurely as we observe the termites, what would he think of the morality that governs us?’ (Maeterlinck, 1927, 157). This ‘someone’ has to be from another planet. Maeterlinck himself finds the connection obvious enough. ‘Our Utopians’, he muses in his introduction to The Life of the White Ant, ‘in their endeavour to describe what society will be in the future, provide bewildering pictures that make our brain reel – and all the time we have under our eyes models as fantastic, as disturbing and – who can tell? – as prophetic as any that could be found in Venus, Jupiter or Mars’ (22). In ‘The Ants’, Empson reverses the view, establishing pity for future humans as we might be understood by an observer from Venus, Jupiter or Mars.

An interplanetary perspective drives the sonnet, transforming it from a whimsical insect fable to a chilling debut (Empson, 2000, 155, later described it as ‘the first poem I thought worth keeping’). Searching in vain for horrors, Geoffrey Thurley (1974, 41–42) regretted that he found it ‘hard to carry away any but a slight shudder of acknowledgement from the poem. We see the point, but little else happens. We do not, after all, feel deeply altered or affected by the reflection that nature’s obscure rituals and humble scavengers often conceal a rationale we might be pleased, one day, to have applied to our own behaviour patterns’. Ricks (1974, 183) senses that there is more to be said about the poem, but finds himself ‘unhelpfully perplexed by it, though moved’. Such half-readings are all that the poem offers up until we realise that the alien encounters of H. G. Wells were inescapable not only for Empson but also in some way for his two more obvious points of departure for ‘The Ants’, Eliot and Maeterlinck. Every nuance in the poem shifts around this crux. The mantra of self-contained lines starting with ‘We’ suddenly seems desperate rather than confident, a catalogue of routines perpetuated by a dying race. Their ‘all-but freedom’ becomes darkly ironic, and the movement towards an overview of earth a feeble gesture that, if stronger, would reveal only a desolate planetary surface, in stark contrast to the lush gardens of memory. ‘What though the garden in one glance appears?’ That careless question now sounds brittle, while the penultimate ‘skeleton’ line trades its tinge of melodrama for the real prospect of total extinction, with not even bones to record the history of an entire species. Dwindling supplies must be hoarded underground, their only purpose to defer the inevitable expiration. Here is the inverse of Martian attack, as the inhabitants of a dying planet burrow deeper into their own demise without even attempting to conquer a neighbour world.

Where ‘The Ants’ departs from both Maeterlinck and Wells is in its effort to transcend the established political symbolism of social insects. The formicary or termitary’s blend of communal behaviour with destructive power would have made connections with socialism inevitable in the context of fears about Bolshevism in Europe from 1917 onwards, but the link had already been made explicit through nineteenth-century debates over collectivism versus individualism. J. F. M. Clark (1997, 170) has pointed out that ‘the “co-operative” behaviour of social insects was a staple of socialist and collectivist arguments’ before the turn of the twentieth century. John Lubbock, a key source of insect knowledge for Wells, resisted ‘utopian depictions of co-operative, altruistic communities of ants and bees’ (Clark, 1997, 171), and this attitude may have helped shape the depiction of Selenite society in The First Men in the Moon. In his work on ants, Auguste Forel had envisioned a socialist world state modelled on the formicary (1928, II, 350; see King, 2006, 38; Sleigh, 2003, 77–78, and 2007, 30, 160, 221). Maeterlinck blends politics into his appropriation of the analogy (from Eugène Marais) of the termitary as organism, describing the workers as ‘collective stomach and belly of the population’, representing ‘an absolute communism, a communism of the oesophagus and the bowels, a collective coprophagy’ (1927, 70). Warrior termites, by contrast, form ‘a very wretched aristocracy’, discovered ‘in the bosom of the Soviet republic’ (89). Maeterlinck is less optimistic than Forel about insect society as a model, finding that ‘the gods of communism become insatiable Molochs’ in the termitary. ‘The more they are given, the more they require: and they persist in their demands until the individual is annihilated and his misery complete’ (152).

Empson’s poem ‘The Ants’ reframes the dilemma over collective versus individualist organisation with impending planetary decay in mind. The insects in the poem, by analogy with a hesitant lover, retreat below, opting for a social form that is safer in the short term but ultimately self-destructive. These ant-people are the opposite of space men, disinclined to view the earth from above and nervous about change. It is on these terms that the poem connects the psychology of a failed romance to global politics, in the process enabling a shift in the cultural significance of insect life. Far from being socialists, the underground creatures represent a retreat from alien and revolutionary modes of existence: they are the ultimate conservatives. The poem neither advocates nor repudiates socialism, but poses instead the question of what can be lost through mass shrinking from contact with alien systems of thought. And it does so not in a temper of reform, but by inhabiting with almost complete empathy the transition into a state of fearfulness. As John Wain noted, ‘Though gloomy, the poem has a steadying effect’ (1978, 180–81). The retreating insects anticipate a transition from colonial expansion into a form hypersecurity that is ultimately even more self-destructive than war. In this sense ‘The Ants’ extends beyond 1930s anticipation of the Second World War, prefiguring the cold war context in which Empson wrote ‘Donne the Space Man’.

III

The earth’s relationship with space was a big theme during 1957, as plans for the upcoming International Geophysical Year (IGY) were widely disseminated and celebrated. Less publicly, Britain’s intermediate-range ballistic missile, Blue Streak, went into development (only to be cancelled in 1960 – Millard, 2001, 4), while the Skylark research rocket saw its first successful launches (Godwin, 2007). The big surprise of the IGY was, of course, the successful launch of a Soviet earth satellite ahead of the planned US programme. Historians have noted that ‘Sputnik turned space from a realm of dreams and fantasies into a locus of superpower rivalry, a major battlefield in the technological cold war’ (Logsdon, 2002, 264, citing Krige). John Krige in particular has argued that the transformation was more marked and immediate in America, where ‘Sputnik and space’ offered ‘a new focal point in the titanic confrontation between the two world systems’ (2002, 292). In Europe their significance was ‘far thinner, far more restricted’. For British ‘scientists and policy makers’ at the end of 1958, for example, ‘space was a place where Britain would harvest scientific data and gain scientific prestige, but also a place where she would confirm, to herself and to others, that she was still a major power to be reckoned with’ (299).

Empson reached for the ‘space man’ moniker at a time when the meaning of ‘space’ was being renegotiated amid heightened tension between the pursuit of national prestige and the rhetoric of international collaboration. The phrase ‘freedom of space’ captures this tension perfectly: aircraft needed permission to fly through sovereign airspace, but if an orbiting device at higher altitude could establish legal exemption, then surveillance devices might also be deployed without retribution (Day, 2002, 165). The IGY logo promoted internationalism: a globe segmented by lines of latitude and longitude, one face in shade, displays a satellite in orbit, transcending all divisions. Following Sputnik, the image must have proved as vexing to American pride as the persistent ‘beep beep’ of the Soviet satellite being picked up by tracking equipment. Beginning his essay far from any concept of superpower rivalry, Empson introduces the idea in typically chatty, casual terms: ‘Donne, then, from a fairly early age, was interested in getting to another planet much as the kids are nowadays’ (1993a, 78). The essay makes clear, however, that fantasies could have serious consequences in Renaissance Europe. ‘The police state which uses torture to impose a doctrine was very familiar in the sixteenth century’, Empson observes, jibing in parenthesis that ‘this may come as a surprise to anyone who has adopted Christianity as an escape from Communism’ (81). An earlier essay, also printed in the Kenyon Review, identifies Donne’s ‘main rhetorical trick’ of identifying individuals or lovers on a separate planet with the Logos as Spanish in origin. Again, parenthesis flags the contemporary equivalent: ‘The motto on his youthful portrait is Spanish, and Spain was still the great danger to England; it must have been rather like a modern Englishman or American displaying a motto in Russian’ (1993a, 74).

The ‘space man’ essay is preoccupied with freedom of thought and its punishment. Donne ‘needed to be allowed to recognize the variety of the world’, and demonstrated in his poems ‘a good deal of perky courage, as well as a secret largeness of mind’ (1993a, 84, 92). Such a mind is ‘rather hard to make sense of’, Empson warned, ‘because it is so invincibly balanced, or simply legal; it cannot help seeing all the alternatives as if in a chess-game; but that inherently made it demand a fair amount of latitude’ (111). Largeness of mind in the Renaissance example is ranged against the restricted view of twentieth-century commentators who refused to entertain Donne’s heresy of the separate planet: ‘a historian who refuses to believe in it merely because nobody dared leave any documents about it can be deceived by any police state’ (92). This commitment to a balanced mind (promoted by his Cambridge English tutor I. A. Richards) was one of Empson’s core professional values, as John Haffenden has demonstrated (2006, 90). It can be seen in his earliest book reviews, for example in his appreciation of works that ‘gratify our strong and critical curiosity about alien modes of feeling, our need for the flying buttress of sympathy with systems other than our own’ (1993b, 32). As a teacher in China during the 1940s, he ‘insisted upon the supreme importance of independent judgement, and determined in his Composition class that the students should not be captivated by Communist dogma, or any other line of thought, without first examining it from every possible (and preferably skeptical) angle’ (Haffenden, 2006, 120). This, then, is what being a ‘space man’ meant to Empson as he worked on Donne during the 1940s and ’50s: a radical stance that does not simply confront prevailing authority, but is prepared to question its own position. It was the ability to balance defiance with doubt that Empson most admired, and his verdict on Donne’s eventual conversion is a heartfelt acknowledgement of how difficult it is to sustain such a position: ‘By the time he took Anglican Orders I imagine he was thankful to get back from the interplanetary spaces, which are inherently lonely and ill-provided’ (1993a, 84).

Such a conception of ‘space’ is actively in tension with messages conveyed by the advocates of Britain’s rocket and satellite programmes during the late 1950s. Coverage in Discovery, a popular science journal aimed at readers with a serious interest in science (Bowler, 2009, 173–77), gives an indication of how the prospects for space exploration were presented to British audiences at this time. An image printed in July 1955 took readers to the brink of space, showing ‘earth as an astronaut might see it’, in a ‘composite photograph […] built up from pictures taken by a Viking rocket about 150 miles above the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico’ (Porter, 1955, 295). The implied astronaut’s origin is specifically New Mexico, not simply planet Earth. A photograph from April 1956 expressed the idea of space as ‘a realm controlled by scientists seeking knowledge and prestige’. Two men in suits dwarf an earth globe; one touches the surface with his little finger while the other observes, pipe in hand. The caption explains: ‘Dr. Joseph Kaplan, chairman of the U.S. National Committee for the International Geophysical Year, looks on as Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, an executive committee member, inscribes the path of the proposed earth satellite on a globe at the University of

Michigan’ (Singer, 1956, 145).

Discovery authors were quite at ease in viewing the realm of ‘dreams and fantasies’ as being also an arena for demonstrations of national prestige and power. In ‘A Physicist’s Views on Interplanetary Travel’ (October 1955), George Thomson promised that ‘much more money’ was ‘being spent on problems closely associated with that of leaving this planet than appears to the public’, thanks to work on guided missiles – an example of how ‘the needs of war are the stimulus to the arts of peace’ (1955, 425). R. L. F. Boyd, discussing ‘Research by Rockets’ (July 1955), praised ‘Hitler’s sinister secret weapon’, the V-2, as ‘an outstanding technical achievement’ (1955, 273). In a further article, ‘British Plans for Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research’ (February 1956), he argued that, despite the head start of America and Russia at the end of the war, Britain might usefully establish her own rocket programme. Accompanying that image of Kaplan, Spilhaus and the globe, an article by S. F. Singer on ‘The Artificial Earth Satellite’ concluded with apparent internationalism: ‘In an age where technological progress on a rapid scale has served to deepen the tensions between nations, this prospect of a common scientific endeavour may lift mankind above the frightening prospects of global warfare’ (1956, 145). But the article itself was largely a promotion of the British MOUSE project (Minimum Orbital Unmanned Satellite of the Earth). Starting with Newton, Singer was careful to include mostly British names: Sir Edward Appleton, W. R. Piggott, Bristol University, Balfour Stewart. A space man must, in the mid to late 1950s, also carry a distinct national identity.

Composed during the months before Sputnik, ‘Donne the Space Man’ offers readers the Renaissance poet as a doughty, doubting adventurer, in contrast to the confident yet nationally envious representatives of globe-grasping space imperialism. His journey into space echoes the activities of Garry Davis, the young air force veteran who in 1948 ‘renounced his American citizenship, declared himself a world citizen’ and ‘called for the establishment of a government superior to the great powers’ (Baratta, 2004, 399). It is the need for a space man like Davis or Donne that ‘The Ants’ foresees, in an act of prevision that was enabled by the poet’s absorption of scientific romances. The Wellsian ability to switch and view terrestrial affairs from a planetary perspective, reducing human interests to the scale of insect life, equipped Empson at the age of twenty to doubt whether people of earth were capable of living up to global visions that would be realised and undermined in equal measure during the space era. (Empson is not the only modernist writer to have linked insects with global vision – see Henry, 2003, for an exploration of these interlinked themes in Woolf and her circle.)

Such a reading obviates any need to fix ‘The Ants’ as an allegory of male fear of female reproductive power (though Haffenden, 2005, 123–25, has made it clear that this was a significant component in the poet’s psyche during his undergraduate years). But it does bring us back from space to children, for the opposite of ant-like hypersecurity is to be more like Alice: uncomfortable when enclosed, and able to cope with alien modes of feeling. The Alice essay concludes Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), in which Empson first broached the topic of Donne’s dangerous ‘interplanetary spaces’ (1995, 66). ‘The child is a microcosm like Donne’s world’, Empson remarked in parenthesis, in his preamble to an exposition of the essential independence brought by Alice to this role: ‘Normally the idea of including all sorts of men in yourself brings in an idea of reconciling yourself with nature and therefore gaining power over it. The Alices are more self-protective; […] There is a real feeling of isolation and yet just that is taken as the source of power’ (209–10). Alice may be the world that the ants glimpse through a chink in their mud galleries, and turn away from: she is the ultimate space man, frightening not because female but because nobody can prevent her from recognising ‘the variety of the world’.

Blending entomology and science fiction, ‘The Ants’ participates in a network of reading that includes Carroll/Dodgson, Donne, Freud, Wells, Maeterlinck, Wheeler and Eliot (alongside Shakespeare and Milton – see Haffenden, 2005, 124). A pun in Empson’s review of The Life of the White Ant implies that science in culture is more a matter for the bowels than the brain: the literary populariser is ‘digesting the discoveries of the scientists into an emotionally available form’ (1993b, 23). Once made ‘emotionally available’, science might be thought of as dung, no longer very useful for making accurate pictures of the world. But here, as in the termitary, there is a prospect of redeeming ‘waste’ (see Ricks, 1974, 155, on Empson and ‘waste’):

If a termite happens to change its skin, the slough is immediately devoured. Should one die – worker, king, queen or warrior – the corpse is forthwith eaten up by the survivors. There is no waste: the clearance is automatic, and always profitable: everything is good, nothing lies about, everything is edible, everything is cellulose, and the excrement is used almost indefinitely over and over again. Moreover, excrement is the raw material, so to speak, of all their activities, including, as we have just seen, nutrition. (Maeterlinck, 1927, 70–71)

Empson’s insect allegory opens both his 1935 Poems and the 1955 Collected Poems with a refusal of space flight, warning readers that they may find it difficult to get away from earth – a place that has been constructed from endlessly chewed and re-digested reading matter. The style of reading invited by the poem, which gains its full meaning and force only once the primary intertexts have been absorbed, asks for readers who behave more like termites than entomologists.