When he moved to Paris in the 1920s, Archibald MacLeish (1892 – 1982) ran with the likes of Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and Gertrude Stein. In his life he won three Pulitzers and was published widely. Despite first appearances, the following poem doesn’t just pit science against faith; it juxtaposes the persistence of the unknown with the known, the unmeasurable and the measurable. As with much of MacLeish’s work, its aims are as emotional as they are intellectual.

Dr. Sigmund Freud Discovers the Sea Shell
by Archibald MacLeish

Science, that simple saint, cannot be bothered
Figuring what anything is for:
Enough for her devotions that things are
And can be contemplated soon as gathered.

She knows how every living thing was fathered,
She calculates the climate of each star,
She counts the fish at sea, but cannot care
Why any one of them exists, fish, fire or feathered.

Why should she? Her religion is to tell
By rote her rosary of perfect answers.
Metaphysics she can leave to man:
She never wakes at night in heaven or hell

Staring at darkness. In her holy cell
There is no darkness ever: the pure candle
Burns, the beads drop briskly from her hand.

Who dares to offer Her the curled sea shell!
She will not touch it!—knows the world she sees
Is all the world there is! Her faith is perfect!

And still he offers the sea shell . . .

What surf
Of what far sea upon what unknown ground
Troubles forever with that asking sound?
What surge is this whose question never ceases?

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