“What you see in a total eclipse is entirely different from what you know,” Annie Dillard wrote in her classic essay on the otherworldliness of totality. Nearly a century earlier, and a quarter century after pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell’s poetic and rhetorically brilliant report on the Great Eclipse of the nineteenth century, an improbable author wrote the world’s first popular book on the science and splendor of eclipses, containing one of the first uses of the word “astro-physicist” and detailing in poetic prose what phenomena to look for during the dramatic sweep of totality.
Best known as Emily Dickinson’s first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd (November 10, 1856–October 14, 1932) — the longtime lover of the poet’s brother — ended up in charge of Dickinson’s surviving papers through a strange swirl of family loyalties and disloyalties. She edited the first volumes of Dickinson’s posthumously published poems and letters, thus becoming the influential — and controversial — primary sculptor of the poet’s public image. But Todd was also highly knowledgeable about astronomy. Married to the prominent astronomer and observatory director David Peck Todd, Mabel, like other scientists’ wives in the epochs before the scientific pantheon opened its doors to women, had become a de facto assistant in many of her husband’s observations, edited his scientific papers, and traveled with him on numerous research trips around the world, including several major eclipse expeditions.
In 1894, the year she released the first volume of Dickinson’s letters, 38-year-old Todd wrote Total Eclipses of the Sun (public library | public domain) — an unprecedented guide to the history, science, and spellbinding surreality of eclipses, in which Todd reasons like a scientist and rhapsodizes like a poet, embodying the “enchanter” level that crowns the hierarchy of great science writing.
Embossed on the cover of the small red fabric-bound book are lines from great poems, which Todd must have chosen as emblematic of the emotional reality of experiencing a total solar eclipse — “Meek, yielding to the occasion’s call / And all things suffering from all / Thy function apostolical / In peace fulfilling” (from Wordsworth’s poem “To the Daisy”), “The constellated flower that never sets” (from Shelley’s “The Question”), “The daisie, or els the eye of the day” (from Milton’s “Sonnet to the Nightingale”).
Todd opens the final chapter of the book with a verse from Emily Dickinson — “Eclipses are predicted, / And science bows them in” — then adds:
Poets usually care little for the modus operandi of scientific phenomena; the lines above embrace the fact, the result, the gist of the whole matter, and that ought to be sufficient.
But many will desire to know more of the detail.
In her book, penned not for professional astronomers but for those “without technical knowledge, who are yet curious as to these strangely impressive phenomena, — and with the hope, too, of creating farther intelligent interest,” Todd provides that detail with a scientist’s rigor and a poet’s sensibility. She writes:
It matters little whether we regard the point of view of the savage, who is awe-struck because he does not know what terrific happenings such a spectacle may forebode, or that of the astronomer, who by dint of much travelling by sea and by land may many times have observed the Sun entirely obscured, and knows there is nothing to fear, a total solar eclipse is a most imposing natural phenomenon.
She contrasts its profound effect with that of its scientifically interesting but emotionally lackluster counterpart, the partial eclipse:
Partial eclipses, though of little scientific value, have interesting features of their own, sometimes showing all the attendant phenomena of entire obscuration, except the total phase. If the Sun’s disk is more than half covered, there is the same weird light, always wan and unnatural, of a quality quite different from mere twilight, and growing constantly duskier, — crescents underneath dense foliage, — half indifferent spectators gazing sunward through glass smoked to varying degrees of sootiness, — the crescentic Sun growing momentarily narrower, — a curious yet apathetic crowd surrounding the telescope-man in the public park…
After explaining the science behind various curiosities of eclipses — why an eclipse can never last longer than eight minutes and why its path, while thousands of miles long, can rarely exceed 140 miles in width and 167 miles in breadth — Todd offers an arrestingly lyrical account of what it actually feels like to witness a total solar eclipse:
As the dark body of the Moon gradually steals its silent way across the brilliant Sun, little effect is at first noticed. The light hardly diminishes, apparently, and birds and animals detect no change. During the partial phase a curious appearance may be noticed under any shady tree. Ordinarily, without an eclipse, the sunlight filters through the leaves in a series of tiny, overlapping disks on the ground, each of which is an image of the Sun.
[…]
As the entire duration of an eclipse, partial phases and all, embraces two or three hours, often for an hour after “first contact” insects still chirp in the grass, birds sing, and animals quietly continue their grazing. But a sense of uneasiness seems gradually to steal over all life. Cows and horses feed intermittently, bird songs diminish, grasshoppers fall quiet, and a suggestion of chill crosses the air. Darker and darker grows the landscape.
[…]
Then, with frightful velocity, the actual shadow of the Moon is often seen approaching, a tangible darkness advancing almost like a wall, swift as imagination, silent as doom. The immensity of nature never comes quite so near as then, and strong must be the nerves not to quiver as this blue-black shadow rushes upon the spectator with incredible speed. A vast, palpable presence seems overwhelming the world. The blue sky changes to gray or dull purple, speedily becoming more dusky, and a death-like trance seizes upon everything earthly. Birds, with terrified cries, fly bewildered for a moment, and then silently seek their night quarters. Bats emerge stealthily. Sensitive flowers, the scarlet pimpernel, the African mimosa, close their delicate petals, and a sense of hushed expectancy deepens with the darkness. An assembled crowd is awed into absolute silence almost invariably… Often the very air seems to hold its breath for sympathy; at other times a lull suddenly awakens into a strange wind, blowing with unnatural effect.
Then out upon the darkness, grewsome but sublime, flashes the glory of the incomparable corona, a silvery, soft, unearthly light, with radiant streamers, stretching at times millions of uncomprehended miles into space, while the rosy, flaming protuberances skirt the black rim of the Moon in ethereal splendor. It becomes curiously cold, dew frequently forms, and the chill is perhaps mental as well as physical.
Suddenly, instantaneous as a lightning flash, an arrow of actual sunlight strikes the landscape, and Earth comes to life again, while corona…
The post What to Look for During a Total Solar Eclipse: Mabel Loomis Todd’s Poetic 19th-Century Guide to Totality, with Help from Emily Dickinson appeared first on FeedBox.