What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? -- Richard Feynman

When I heard the learned poet
lay out his metrical forms, when he called
upon the engineering of words and lines
and read me a telescope in the lecture-hall,
I thought: Here is a fellow
who has only seen the stars from his back yard.
He has never slipped over the waterfall
of equations, or agonized over redshifts
in the frozen air. If he ever sat
in the prime focus cage,rising and gliding
just above the mirror, he would have seen
the stars, yes; also the oiled history of numbers
shining in perfect silence.