Theory of the Earth

Colin Guthrie sends us this poem by Edwin Morgan, as a response to Jim Henderson’s pieces about James Hutton, the geologist who came to Arran and spotted the ‘unconformity’ that started him on a new idea of how the earth evolved. Hutton and Burns knew each other well, and there’s a neat quote from For Auld Lang Syne at the end of Morgan’s poem.

Edwin Morgan

James Hutton, that true son of fire who said
to Burns, ’Aye, man, the rocks melt wi’ the sun’
was sure the age of reason’s time was done:
what but imagination could have read
granite boulders back to the molten roots?
And how far back was back, and how far on
would basalt still be basalt, iron iron?
Would second seas re-drown the fossil brutes?
‘We find no vestige of a beginning,
no prospect of an end.’ They died almost
together, poet and geologist,
and lie in wait for hilltop buoys to ring
or aw the seas gang dry and Scotland’s coast
dissolve in crinkled sand and pungent mist.