Darwin: A Life in Poems, which follows Charles Darwin from birth to death in episodes that make interesting poetic use of prose.
Although Darwin was a rather sickly man of science, his life was enlivened by the famous voyages, his wife and children, and a long-distance collaboration with Alfred Russel Wallace.
Here is Darwin’s reaction to his initial encounter with rainforest in 1832:
“Delight / is too weak a word for how a naturalist, / alone the first time with all this, must feel.”
He’s walking into every dream he’s ever seen: "tasseled seedpods, trefoil, nodule; shrapnel of decaying trees like giant columns of a fallen temple, their gold-bone mossy architraves upwelted with lianas. Creepers—and a strangler ficus—crafting their way to the light. Relationships!" …
The luxuriance of language seems like syntactical onomatopoeia. The sections that record the end of Darwin’s voyage, his visits to Patagonia and the Galápagos Islands, use the same exuberant language, weaving taxonomy and precise botanical and zoological description into poetry.
Darwin, who was reclusive and homely, was lucky to find a devoted wife in his cousin Emma Wedgwood. Here they are, betrothed:
They stood silent in the drawing-room, surprised. She’d be engineer of all his happiness. Bees shifted honey-bags up his spine. He was roses burning alive, and she was the haze above tropical forest plus the unfathomed riches within. Like giving to a blind man eyes.
That last phrase Darwin himself wrote after seeing tropical vegetation for the first time, on the Cape Verde Islands.
From: http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/poetry-in-the-wild
