By far the most famous person from Penzance is Sir Humphry Davy whose statue gazes across at St Michael’s Mount from the main street of the town. Davy is perhaps most famous for inventing the miners’ safety lamp and the arc lamp, but he identified many of the most well-known elements in the Periodic Table such as potassium, sodium, calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron. Nitrous Oxide (also known as Laughing Gas) had been synthesised by Joseph Priestly in 1722, but Davy, on one hand believed from personal experiments that it could be used as an anaesthetic, but the devil in him thought it might have pleasurable qualities and he and his poet friends, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey as well as the inventor James Watt started experimenting with it as a social drug.
Davy was an accomplished poet, as recognised by Coleridge, Southey, Shelley and Wordsworth and he wrote the following
On breathing the Nitrous Oxide
Not in the ideal dreams of wild desire
Have I beheld a rapture wakening form
My bosom burns with no unhallowed fire
Yet is my cheek with rosy blushes warm
Yet are my eyes with sparkling lustre filled
Yet is my murmuring mouth replete with dying sound
Yet are my limbs with inward transports thrilled
And clad with new born mightiness around.
Bryan Ferry wrote a song dedicated to Humphrey Bogart called 2HB (geddit), so I have for a while now wanted to write, using the song’s template, a poem called 2HD (to Humphry Davy) which eulogises the poet that hailed from my home town. He is buried in Geneva, Switzerland where he died from complications that were likely caused by the numerous experiments he carried out on himself in the pursuit of science.
2HD
(after Roxy Music’s 2HB)
Oh, I was moved by your statue…
Marble-carved figure of genius.
No seagull or road cone abases you.
Safety lamp held in your right hand;
Button undone on your waistcoat.
A hint at an Emperor’s regard for you?
What’s cooking with you, H?
Brav Cornish lad.
What’s cooking with you, H?
You never broke bad.
Left home to become someone
And you won’t be the last one.
Take two poets – Romantics…
Smoky chem lab situation.
Your laughing gas wakens the rapture.
Thrilled by its latent potential…
Momentous exhilaration.
A sparkle-eyed vision of stranger things.
What’s cooking with you, H?
Warm rosy hue.
What’s cooking with you, H?
Coleridge too.
You burn, with hallowed fire,
In the thrall of your desire.
Science distilled through the senses.
You saw beauty where others did not.
Ingenue, boyish and handsome;
Prescient fashionista.
Your rising star observed with envy.
What’s cooking with you, H?
Real fancy dan.
What’s cooking with you, H?
Not the man’s man.
Women love him, send him sonnets…
Making eyes beneath bonnets.
An aesthete doubled as lab rat…
Perfectionist’s inky fingers.
Careless of putting your life at risk.
Your Celtic flame burned like magnesium;
Vibrant but just for a short time.
Left you a victim of consequence.
What’s cooking with you, H?
Gave it your all.
What’s cooking with you, H?
Destined to fall.
Your memory stays
But lingers ever;
Far from home in Gèneve.
© graylightfoot
gray lightfoot 