Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun…
James Hutton met Robert Burns in 1787. Later that year, Burns chose to visit some of the sites discussed in Hutton’s THEORY OF THE EARTH. Is there an echo of Hutton’s “deep time”—oceans evaporating, rocks melting—to be heard in Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” (pub. 1794)?
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https://sunnydunny.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/robert-burns-and-geology/
#Scottish #literature #RobertBurns #poem #poetry #Enlightenment #18thcentury #geology #science #DeepTime
what but imagination could have read
granite boulders back to their molten roots?
And how far back was back, and how far on
would basalt still be basalt, iron iron?
—Edwin Morgan certainly though so, and was inspired – by Burns & Hutton – to write “Theory of the Earth” (first published in New Writing Scotland 2, 1984)
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#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #EdwinMorgan #poetry #DeepTime #geology #science #poem