On Blackford Hill, my dear, where, in summer,
The fields, in their promised fullness of grass,
Are sweet upon the air, where a few miles off
The shy Pentlands suggest a hinterland
Of farms, of rivers, and of Border towns,
We rested on a half-completed walk;
You pointed to the Observatory nearby
And said, “What do you think they really see?”
I could have answered, “Everything, I think,”
For Blackford is the only Scottish hill
On which the ordinary course of work
Is to question how planets come to be,
About how worlds, and all that they contain—
Flowers and stock exchanges and waterfalls—
Developed as they did, routinely talk
Of an unseen world of particles, how they
Move and die, spark briefly, things beyond the grasp
Of two average walkers, unversed in physics,
For whom the journal Nature is too hard to comprehend.
You say, “Professor Higgs worked not far from here,
Barely half a mile away.” I nod and say, “He did,”
And point out the path we must take to descend,
Drawn by gravity, another force we cannot see.