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be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects
of science itself." But neither Wordsworth nor his public anticipated a situation in which the poet's language would itself be
superseded. Alienated from "impressions" which may initiate
the next stage of human evolution, the contemporary poet and
his no less distanced public can only stand by and ask questions
about what it all means.
And so when James Dickey came to write the third and last
of his poems on the Apollo flights he made his ignorance the
form of his praise. In "The Moon Ground," which Life published in its July 4, 1969 issue, rhetorical questions fill the poem,
along with affirmations-if that's what they are-that the
meaning of this adventure will emerge somehow from the data
processed by computers. It will not be discovered by poets, or
by the astronauts either. Dickey acknowledges that the astronauts are servants and not masters of the enterprise: "We are
here to do one/ Thing only, and that is rock by rock to carry
the moon to take it/ Back." The rocks have the "secret of Time"
and though an older culture relied on artists to unravel this secret
now the machines will establish its true, quantifiable nature.
From this data, and data collected on voyages deeper and deeper
into space, the machines will tell us, because only they have
the language, what we will be. Dickey's poem ends with the
line, "We bend, we pick up stones." This is the definitive image
of Natural Man in the space age, the image used in the film
2001 to depict cavemen engaged in the brute warfare that man
carried out so long as his mind was cradled on this planet.
Dickey had looked to the space program as deliverance from
the trivial; after Apollo 11 he would look to wilderness as
deliverance from the mechanistic life of which the moon landing
came to seem the apotheosis.
Poised between a Romantic enthusiasm for the space program
which he realized would lead him into the arms of Wernher
von Braun and the worship of machines, and the anti-Romantic
stance of a poet like Auden, cultivating his garden, Dickey in
1969 embodied the whole set of ambivalent feelings about the
moon landing that stirred unspoken in the American public.
Because it expresses these divided loyalties so clearly "The
