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With that, I ask this question: What makes Collins’ poetry so captivating to so many?

Robert Frost, 1874-1963.

The answer may lie in the example of Frost, who also had a large public role. In 1961, Frost became the first poet ever invited to read at a presidential inauguration, for John F. Kennedy. His public fame rested on his image as a benign New England sage. Cultural critic Lionel Trilling objected to that view, saying of Frost in 1959, “He is not the Frost who reassures us by affirmations of old virtues, simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling: anything but … I regard Frost as a terrifying poet.” Trilling found in Frost’s poetry existential questions seething with darkness.

Collins was appointed poet laureate shortly before September 11, 2001. Today, as we live in a post-9/11 society, we reflect upon the events of that day—and the years that have followed—realizing that our world is far too familiar with danger and dread.

Hence Collins’ appeal. While Frost’s poetry consists of fear and terror where one would expect happiness and joy, Collins has an uncanny ability to find a small glimmer of light, love, and hope in the most basic tokens of our dark times: Silverware, a bird, lawn chairs, and teenage girls who cannot help but say, “Oh, my God” to everyone about everything.

Collins populates his poems with lonely figures straight out of an Edward Hopper painting, imbuing them with simple good will and humor. His poem, “The Chairs That No One Sits In,” would be an example of anomie and bleakness, particularly because he tells us that, “You never see anyone/ sitting in these forlorn chairs,” if not for stanzas such as these:

It may be none of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs,

That imaginative turn takes what should be an oppressively sad poem and transforms it into a cause for wonder as he imagines people in the two chairs, a man and a woman, and tells us that, “there is only the sound of their looking.” This, Collins argues, is the very definition of poetry. In his poem called “Poetry,” he con-cludes the following of himself and his fellow poets:

We are busy doing nothing—
and all we need for that is an afternoon,
a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,
or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

Collins unabashedly celebrates poetry for its ability to make readers pause, celebrate, and engage in anything and everything, from the most awful to the most seemingly trivial—until, at a poems’ root, it yields surprise, and that glimmer of light we need so much.

In his poem “Baby Listening,” Collins imagines that a hotel service for “baby listen-ing” is offering babies who will listen to guests. In fact, the service is for families who would like staff to listen in on a sleeping baby while the parents go out to the hotel restaurant. As he writes: “Baby listening—not a baby who happens to be listening/ as I thought when I first checked in.” He adds: “Lucky for some of us/ poetry is a place where both are true at once/ where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.”

In the universe of poetry that Collins creates, the poet fails only when he or she becomes too simple. Like Frost, Collins is deceptive. But unlike Frost, Collins, in a dark time, lets his readers know the secret of how and where to find light.

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In popular culture, black and white are thought of as simple opposites, but my colleague Jose-Manuel Alonso and I have been uncovering ways that we perceive black and white differently, and how our brains have evolved mechanisms that create these differences. I want to walk you through some of our experiments that have led to an interesting answer to a 400-year-old puzzle.

If you look at the left side of the two busts of Caesar paired at the top, you’ll see a three-dimensional white sculpture, because we interpret the two-dimensional variations of brightness in the image as shading caused by light reflected from an object. In the photo on the right, we perceive essentially the same three-dimensional shape, but lit from the opposite side, and appearing to be made of a darker material. So not only is our judgment of the illumination different, but so is our judgment of the object’s material properties. This photo is just the contrast reversal (photo negative) of the photo with the white bust, so comparing the two illustrates how we interpret gradual variations of light versus variations of dark.

The difference in how we use black and white cues to infer the properties of an object is even more evident when the changes in brightness are more distinct. The bright streaks on the black bust above appear to be highlights, and from their sharpness and small scale relative to the object, we can estimate the glossiness of the material. If the contrast of the image is reversed (the right side of the image pair above), we see a white or even metallic bust, and the black streaks appear to be smudges or paint. In this situation the two tones give entirely different sorts of clues about illumination and material properties.

These examples illustrate a basic asymmetry in the way we perceive white and black: We interpret difference in lights as information about illumination, while differences in darks reveal something about materials. These interpretations fit well with the physics of the world: Illuminants light up objects, and are reflected less by highly absorbent materials and holes.

Other basic asymmetries have been noted for centuries. Galileo Galilei, who was as perceptive as he was creative, observed that Venus appeared larger through his telescope as a light object against the dark night sky than it appeared as a dark object against the bright day sky. Ernst Mach, for whom the speed of sound is named, demonstrated that letters are difficult to recognize if some strokes are white and others black, suggesting that the two shades may be processed separately by the brain.

We began our experiments by testing whether subjects could pick out blacks and whites on unbiased backgrounds with equal ease. We created randomly arranged background panels with an equal number of equal-sized black and white pixels, and then asked observers to count the number of larger targets presented on the background as quickly as possible. To make the targets clearly different from the background pixels, we made them nine times larger in area. The targets were either all black or all white. To our surprise we found that people counted black targets significantly faster and with many fewer errors. You can see that black targets are easier to identify than white ones in these 12 examples:

How could we explain this discrepancy? Galileo had attributed the illusion of Venus’ size to light scatter in the eye, which would enlarge the image of a light area compared to a dark area. Herman von Helmholtz, the polymath physicist and physician, showed that there was too little light scatter in the eye for Galileo’s explanation to be complete, but the actual cause remained unclear. Helmholtz took Galileo’s observation and made a simpler, abstract version of it with equal-sized white and black squares on the opposite backgrounds. The white square appeared larger, so he called it the “irradiation illusion.” We noticed that something akin to the irradiation illusion was occurring in our backgrounds, too: Even though there were equal areas of black and white, there appeared to be more white area.

We measured the magnitude of Helmholtz’s irradiation illusion by asking people to increase the area of the black square until it appeared to be the same size as the white. Then we calculated the ratio of the physical sizes of the squares. Similarly, we measured the magnitude of the area illusion in the background by having people increase the ratio of black to white pixels until the areas appeared equal. Since the ratios required by the two corrections were approximately equal, we reasoned that both illusions must share an underlying cause. We became more convinced that our ability to see black versus white targets was influenced by the irradiation illusion when we found that if we used backgrounds with what people saw as the “balanced” ratio of black to white, targets of the two shades were equally easy for viewers to see and count.

Our next step was to search for a brain mechanism that could explain the irradiation illusion. When Keffer Hartline recorded the first electric signals from single retinal nerves responding to light stimulation, he found two types of nerves whose responses are shown on the left side of the figure below. One kind of neuron generated spiking electrical signals when exposed to light (bottom two rows). The other kind generated spikes in the dark, but turned off when exposed to light (top row). Since then, such cells have been found in eyes of many species as disparate as insects and mammals, separated by more than 500 million years of distinct evolutionary pressures, suggesting that this neural strategy fits something fundamental about the world, across many environmental niches.

These neurons are called ON and OFF cells, because of their behavior in response to light. Until recently, they had been generally considered to be opposite but equal. However, we found that when we measured the responses of ON cells to increasing equal increments of light on a black background, the response increased rapidly but then plateaued (red curve). On the other hand, OFF cell responses increased roughly in a straight line as light was decreased on a white background (blue curve). The more rapid initial increase in ON outputs explains why we are more sensitive to small increases of light in dark settings than to small decreases of light in bright settings. The plateau at the top of the ON response curve explains why we are more limited at distinguishing progressively lighter shades than we are darker shades. The neural explanation for both the irradiation illusion and Galileo’s observation arises from the same difference in the response curves.

Remarkably, these simple but different responses of the ON and OFF cells also explain some black-white asymmetries that seem almost paradoxical. For example, it is easier to make out black text on a white background than white text on a black background, despite the fact that we are capable of seeing much tinier white dots on black backgrounds than black dots on white backgrounds. The reason for this is that the ON response expands strokes of white letters slightly so that they become more difficult to distinguish. The same effect “expands” a white background, making small black dots seem smaller.

Whites and blacks in images of the world thus arise from different physical causes, provide information about different aspects of the world, and are processed differently by the brain. The differences in how we see shades originate in the beginnings of sensory neural processing. We have yet to figure out the neural mechanisms that allow us to make inferences about illumination and materials from different scales of lights and darks, so we may have much to learn from the strategies that artists use to depict them. If you look at black and white drawings not as impoverished versions of the colored world, but as pared-down illustrations of the cues we use to understand what we are looking at, you can enjoy them as intellectual puzzles, and it may change the way you look at art.

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My work starts on dark, black nights, when there is no moon or reflection from it. The telescopes I use have to be in places with three qualities: High, dry, and—you guessed it—very dark. And so, I search for planets atop the summit of the highest, driest, and darkest peak in Hawaii. Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano—where the world-famous Keck Observatory is located—minimizes the “noise” in the images from Earth’s constantly swirling atmosphere and the light drifting in from cities.

Because black is defined by the absence of light, you might not think there are different gradations of black—but there are when you are hunting for other planets in our galaxy. Every day, I am looking through images that appear, at first, like exposures devoid of any light. In reality, shades of black can hide amazing worlds—some of which could be habitable or inhabited by life forms.

Seeing the color black in fact is a comforting affirmation that I’m searching in the right direction, for a planet must be so faint as to appear to not be there at all. If an image has many bright dots of light, that means I am looking at a field full of stars. I am not interested in objects that emit their own light. A star is too extreme an environment for life as we know it—it’s an enormous ball of hot plasma and even if it had a solid surface to stand on, which it doesn’t, life forms like us would get crushed under the star’s tremendous gravitational pull.

What I’m trying to find are very faint objects that reflect and re-emit the light from a host star nearby. These planets outside our solar system—which are known as exoplanets—are companions to stars, swimming in their own sea of darkness. Finding these planets tells us about the architecture of planetary systems. It also lets us know how common exoplanets are in the habitable regions around stars, where the temperatures are not too hot and not too cold, where liquid water can exist, and complex molecules may have figured out the processes we call life.

Sample image of searching for a planet around a mature star, taken in March 2016 with the NIRC2 camera on Keck II telescope.

 
My research uses the newest planet-hunting technique—“direct imaging.” Put simply, we place a small piece of black film in the field of view of the telescope to dampen the light from the parent star. Then, astronomers like myself can make out the faint planet companions orbiting the star. We rotate the powerful Keck telescope, taking pictures in a time-lapsed sequence, and then apply an intensive mathematical data analysis procedure. Through this process, we can carefully distinguish the feeble signal of a planet from the overwhelming glow of the host star. The dark piece of film is called a coronagraph, and it is a key component of the direct imaging technique.

That’s right, I am actually trying to make the picture darker because the natural blackness of space is not enough to be able to see what we want to see. In order to extract the signal of a planet in an image, there is a lot of interference I have to take out: the random noise from the camera’s own electronics, the scattered light around the coronagraph, and the rotation of the individual exposures. The final image, a deeper tone of black, is the result of stacking cleaned-up exposures to reveal a clear signal from the planetary system. Galileo Galilei, the first observational astronomer, would be fascinated to see how we’ve progressed in the last 400 years. We are now seeing planets in the blackness around other stars, very much in the same way he discovered the faint moon companions around Jupiter.

I did not set out to stare at blackness all day long. I came to astronomy by way of mathematics, which is a great tool for designing ways to see very small perturbations in data. But as I learned more about how astronomy could help expand the boundaries of human knowledge, I became more and more interested in trying to see what the universe conceals in the darkness.

Ultimately, this is what all research is—seeking light in the darkness of the unknown. Our bodies are limited by the sensitivity of the human eye, but we have expanded our searches by manipulating the pixels of more sensitive cameras, and can thus capture evidence of real physical phenomena with our machines. If humans are to learn about how we came to be and search for life beyond ourselves, we must continue to look for answers in the deep blackness of space. And of course, we have to combine that with a little patience for staring into what may seem like a lot of nothingness.

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The 19th century brought exponential changes in light technology and, in large cities, more reliable interconnected gas and electric streetlamps gave rise to vibrant public life after dark. Not only were the streets brighter; homes, shops, and shop windows became fully illuminated. Hours that had once been furtive and confined offered new freedoms as urbanites socialized, shopped, and even worked after darkness fell. Technological developments and increases in light would continue well into the 20th century, and would profoundly alter society, the sense of self, and the natural world.

One way to comprehend the complexity and scope of this transformation is to look at the way artists responded to the changing night and the accompanying changes in human possibility. A recent exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, “Night Vision: Nocturnes in American Arts, 1860-1960”, curated by Joachim Homann, does just that.

The viewer first encounters a series of paintings that testifies to the power and complexity of the full moon, which for centuries had been the most reliable aid to navigation in the night. At the center of these paintings stands Albert Bierstadt’s The Burning Ship from 1869. Bierstadt has given over the right half of the canvas to the full moon: rational, cold, far above human affairs. Its reflection on the water is calm, too, and a far cry from the roil of human history represented on the left side of the painting. A whale ship burns after being attacked by a Confederate cruiser. The flames flare heavenward, uncontrolled and consuming. The escapees look back at what they’ve lost, and perhaps, also, are captured by wonder: There would have been almost no light brighter than that of such a disaster. In the deep shadows behind the conflagration, other ships on the water seem mere shadows navigating the unknown shoals beneath. Their backs are to the moonlight, which offers them nothing now.

The Fountains at Night, World’s Colombian Exposition, 1893, by Winslow Homer. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.

While Bierstadt was painting, the race for a controlled and modest electric light was on, and in 1879 Thomas Edison successfully demonstrated his incandescent bulb, its miraculous filament enclosed in glass, not subject to wind or human breath. By 1893, incandescence was evident everywhere at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. There had never been so much human light in one place before: thousands of lamps along walkways, spotlights illuminating fountains and the shores of Lake Michigan, and hundreds of thousands of bulbs tracing the edifices of the buildings. Winslow Homer’s The Fountains at Night, World’s Columbian Exposition was, at least according to his mother, “the first picture ever painted by electric light.” It is as if Homer has painted the unblinking eye of the late century staring into the future. The grave intensity of its blacks and whites and grays increases the viewer’s sense of urgency as you try to fix the gondola racing across the canvas. It seems it is we who are ephemeral; the light will never change.

By the early 20th century, New York City aimed at turning night into day. Edison himself hoped for as much: “Everything which decreases the sum total of man’s sleep, increases the sum total of man’s capabilities,” he once proclaimed. “There is really no reason why men should go to bed at all.” Berenice Abbott, one of the inveterate photographers of New York City between the World Wars, recorded the city in its many aspects. Her day-lit street shots of automats, lemonade stands, tin merchants, and stoop sitters seem of their time—and firmly of the past for us looking at them now. But her Night View: Midtown Manhattan captures both the city then, and the city as it was to become.

To capture the shot, Abbot hung her camera from an upper floor of the Empire State Building at dusk during one of the longest nights of the year: December 20, 1934. Most of the Midtown office windows appear as fully illuminated rectangles, the signature of incandescent light. (By contrast, a candle, as Gaston Bachelard observes, “does not illuminate an empty room, it illuminates a book.”) A viewer can imagine the countless office workers represented by those windows as part of the rational grid of modernity, connected to the lit streets bisecting the view, the traffic on the avenues below. The most consistently dark parts of the photograph are the roofs of the buildings. There is no light from the heavens. It is all emanating from the hive.

Electric light could show the limits of progress, too. Beauford Delaney’s untitled painting from 1944, an intimate street view of Greenwich Village, suggests a New York darkened by the war, and made complex by the poverty in which Delaney and his compatriots struggled. His canvas is both buoyant and threatening. Look once, and you might see a brightly energized world of marvelous color, but one that is also claustrophobic and disturbed by the streetlamps in their insistent steadfastness. Look again, and the streetlamps form their own coherence. The artist Andrea Sulzer sees them as “notes on a page of sheet music,” in harmony with a small, far moon. Delaney’s moon has little resemblance to Bierstadt’s, so high above human affairs. Here it is, at best, part of the same music as the street—no larger than the individual lamps, illuminating no more than they do.

Moonlight, Wolf, ca. 1909, by Frederick Remington. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; Gift of the members of the Phillips Academy Board of Trustees.

Night Vision, in charting the changing complexities of light and the new mysteries of the night, also reminds its viewers of the enduring mysteries of ancient night. No painting succeeds at this more fully than Frederic Remington’s Moonlight, Wolf, which he painted around 1909, near the end of his life. There is no moon in the frame, only moonlight, which exposes a landscape threaded between stars and starlight on water. The wolf’s bright stare, fixed on the viewer, seems to share the same substance as the stars: two piercing points, as unpredictable and unreadable as a burning ship. To look back at Remington’s wolf at a time when an excess of light obscures the stars and makes it difficult for night hunters to see their prey, is to stare into an eternal immensity. Old night, make no mistake, has not left us.

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Both angled to form the outer edges
of an imaginary sky, where captured
fireflies drift as nameless constellations,
no mythology nor deity to keep them in
place, simply moments reappearing
dimly in a locus of wishes.

Bedridden, a boy
watches this starfield
his sisters had collected earlier along
a ditch bank.
Thoughts glow. He imagines how God felt
before that first genesis of light, how his
own neue Welt seems so momentary.

And one by one as the fireflies fade,
and a longing for them arcs
into an empty ache, the view
becomes nothing but darkness
waiting for something beyond
memory—a glimmer, a climb,
the night sky distilled in shine.

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