It’s almost impossible for us to recapture the pre-Darwinian notion of a species or an individual creature as having issued in its final configuration directly from the hand of its maker. We can’t escape an awareness of the countless mutations and adaptations that every being, including ourselves, has undergone in the long process of evolution. Poets attempt to recover this lost sense of essence. When Rilke writes about a flamingo, he sees it “under the aegis of eternity.” It would have been interesting and startlingly original had he somehow glimpsed, and been able to convey, the shadowy precursors – all those vanished proto-flamingos – that went to form his transcendental waterfowl, but this would have destroyed the Platonic fiction on which his vision depended.

As a young man, Charles Darwin himself was an avid reader of poetry; he “took intense delight,” he tells us, in Shakespeare but loved Milton and Shelley, Byron and Coleridge, as well. In his later years he lost this taste and found poetry intolerable, preferring the popular novels his wife read aloud to him at stated intervals over each working day. His growing indifference to poetry, as well as to music, puzzled and disturbed Darwin; he saw it as a possible symptom of mental decline.

Darwin recounts this change in the account of his life and career that he wrote at the request of his family over a five-year period from 1876 to 1881, a year before his death.Like much else in “The Autobiography of Charles Darwin” (Totem Books, 154 pages, $15), it leaves a faint sense of puzzlement. All his life Darwin suffered from a mysterious illness, involving severe headaches, prolonged bouts of vomiting, and enervating weakness, that disabled him for months at a time. He has been retrospectively diagnosed as suffering from everything from Chagas disease, picked up during his five years aboard the Beagle, to neurotic hypochondria, caused by anxiety over the reception of his theories. But sickness, though it slowed him down, never deflected the stubborn progress of his research or writing, nor did it impair the singular vigor of his prose. The cause must lie elsewhere.

In the “Autobiography,” Darwin acknowledges the gradual erosion of his religious faith. Before he embarked on the Beagle in 1831, he tell us, he, “did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible.” He was amused later to learn that a German phrenologist had analyzed a photograph of him and concluded that he displayed “the bump of reverence developed enough for ten priests.” Though he could be coy about his actual beliefs, trying to evade the issue by declaring them too “private” for discussion, he described himself bluntly as an agnostic.And in a letter he stated, “Science has nothing to do with Christ.” Decades of patient and minute observation of such disparate phenomena as coral reefs, barnacles, and beetles, the innermost architecture of the tiniest plants as well as of vast geological upheavals, together with the powerful theorizing faculty he rightly prided himself on, had caused him to abandon all confidence in biblical revelation. Natural selection had supplanted “design” in his view of the world.

Given Darwin’s achievements, the loss of a taste for poetry might seem small matter for complaint. But I wonder whether it wasn’t linked in some unsuspected way with his renunciation of conventional faith. His scientific conclusions had prompted a deep distrust of human invention. In every merely human construction he caught a strong whiff of “the mind of the monkey,” and what could be more quintessentially human than language itself? His own deductions – unlike scriptural revelation or the fancies of poets – could be verified by objective proof; the claims of gospels, like the claims of poets, could not.

Rather surprisingly, Darwin confesses that writing always vexed him; he remarks that even to write a grammatical sentence, let alone a pleasing one, routinely defeated him. And yet, there is a strange deafness in his “Autobiography” to his own verbal abilities, perhaps akin to his inability to recognize the most familiar melody. Darwin was often a brilliant writer, combining vivid precision with sweeping eloquence. For example, in “The Voyage of the Beagle,”he describes a toad: “If we imagine, first, that it had been steeped in the blackest ink, and then, when dry, allowed to crawl over a board, freshly painted with the brightest vermilion, so as to colour the soles of its feet and parts of its stomach, a good idea of its appearance will be gained.” Who can forget Phryniscus nigricans after that?

Again, in refuting the notion that natural selection robs creatures of divine grandeur, Darwin writes, “When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.” This comes at the end of “On the Origin of Species” of 1859, and the famous final sentence affirms this ennoblement: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

The biblical approach relies on the power of analogy; neither a toad nor a mountain range is only itself, however wondrous, but always points to some further and invisible truth. The creature serves as a steppingstone to the creator. The poetry Darwin loved as a young man derived its beauty from magical analogies; metaphor, rather than actuality, lay at its heart. We can no longer say, he argued, that “the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man,” and yet, that beauty, the result of eons of contending forces, still inspired wonderment. Perhaps at the end things had replaced words in Darwin’s meticulous imagination, but the bump of reverence continued to throb.

eormsby@nysun.com