Poetry and the Atomic Age

The name “Trinity” was chosen for the first nuclear test by J. Robert Oppenheimer. He said later that he didn't know the exact reason why he chose it, but he cited as spiritual and poetic influences John Donne’s "Holy Sonnet XIV," which begins:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer film leans heavily into these literary influences. The movie uses poetic symbolism—like water droplets mimicking atomic blasts and recurring visual motifs of eyes opening and closing—to reflect Oppenheimer’s internal reckoning. His love for Baudelaire, Eliot, and Dante also surfaces in the film’s tone and pacing, adding layers of introspection and ambiguity. Poetry was one lens through which Oppenheimer interpreted the world, especially the moral weight of scientific discovery.

This line invokes the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity — the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — and reflects a plea for divine intervention and transformation. Oppenheimer, who had a deep appreciation for literature and metaphysical poetry, found resonance in Donne’s intense spiritual imagery. The sonnet speaks of being broken, burned, and remade, which can be a metaphor that eerily parallels the destructive and transformative power of the atomic bomb.

In a 1962 letter to General Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer also referenced another Donne poem, "Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness, quoting "As West and East / In all flat Maps—and I am one—are one, / So death doth touch the Resurrection.”

Though he acknowledged that this quote “does not make a Trinity,” it suggests a philosophical reflection on unity, mortality, and rebirth—ideas that may have been swirling in his mind as he named the test.

In a less poetic possibility, some scholars also believe the name was a subtle tribute to Jean Tatlock, a former lover who introduced Oppenheimer to Donne’s poetry and whose death deeply affected him. 

Oppenheimer was drawn to metaphysical poets like Donne, whose works wrestle with themes of mortality, divine judgment, and transformation. The sonnet "Batter my heart, three-person’d God” resonated with Oppenheimer’s inner conflict of the paradox of destruction as a path to salvation. This tension mirrored his role in creating the bomb. He hoped the bomb might end the war, but feared it would unleash irreversible devastation.

Equally influential was the Bhagavad Gita, which Oppenheimer read in Sanskrit and often quoted. Upon witnessing the Trinity explosion, he famously recalled Krishna’s words to Arjuna: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”Some scholars feel that Oppenheimer likely saw himself not as Krishna, the divine force, but as Arjuna, the reluctant warrior compelled by duty, in which case it mirrors his struggle to reconcile scientific achievement with ethical responsibility.

One of the "Holy Sonnets" by John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

In his own writing, Oppenheimer expressed himself with lyrical depth. His poem “Crossing” evokes themes of isolation, transition, and irreversible change. He once said that poetry helped him “search for himself,” and it’s clear that literature wasn’t just a hobby. It was a sanctuary and a mirror.

"Crossing" by J. Robert Oppenheimer

It was evening when we came to the river

with a low moon over the desert

that we had lost in the mountains, forgotten,

what with the cold and the sweating

and the ranges barring the sky.

And when we found it again,

in the dry hills down by the river,

half withered, we had

the hot winds against us.

 

There were two palms by the landing;

the yuccas were flowering; there was

a light on the far shore, and tamarisks.

We waited a long time, in silence.

Then we heard the oars creaking

and afterwards, I remember,

the boatman called to us.

We did not look back at the mountains.

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Prompt: Island

"No man is an island" was originally "No man is an Iland" and is a famous line from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a 1624 prose work. It was the 17th devotion, Meditation XVII. When you see this a s a poem, it is that Donne's punctuation becomes line breaks. The poem also includes the line "...for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

That prose work as a whole is considered similar to 17th-century devotional writing generally, and particularly to Donne's Holy Sonnets. It might surprise you that Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphor. In "The Flea," a flea biting two lovers is compared to sex.

Donne is considered to be a "Metaphysical poet" which was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterized by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. Modern critics often say that "baroque poets" may be more accurate as Donne and other don't fit our more common philosophical use of metaphysical as meaning the study of reality and existence.

If you read any of Donne in school, it was probably "No Man Is An Island" or "Death Be Not Proud," but not  "To His Mistress Going to Bed" or "The Flea." 

"No Man Is an Island" is a poem that explores the interconnectedness of humanity and the impact of loss. The speaker asserts that no individual is isolated, but rather an integral part of the broader human collective. The poem uses the metaphor of comparing humankind to a continent, with each person being a "piece" or "part" of the whole.

Loss appears as the erosion of land by the sea. Donne suggests that the death of even one person diminishes the entire human race. This idea is emphasized by the shift from the hypothetical ("If a clod be washed away") to the personal ("As well as if a manor of thy friend's/Or of thine own were").

The poem's concluding lines, "And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; / It tolls for thee," encapsulate the theme of shared mortality and emphasize the inevitability of death for all.

For this month's call for submissions, we invite poems that consider the island metaphor, our shared world, or the inevitability of death. Donne loved metaphors and that should be a starting place for you. Perhaps, an island suggests other metaphors to you. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the island is a metaphor with multiple layers as it represents isolation, both physically and psychologically, away from the regular world where the characters are stranded. 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE March 31, 2025

Some Donne allusions trivia:

•  No Man Is an Island is also a 1955 book by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
• "For whom the bell tolls" was used by Ernest Hemingway as the title of his 1940 novel. Hemingway uses it as a metaphor for the Spanish Civil War, implying that people in America or other countries should care about what was happening there, and not ignore it because it was happening far away.    
• The band Jefferson Airplane inserts between the track "A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You Shortly" and the song "Young Girl Sunday Blues," this Donne joke "No man is an island! He's a peninsula."

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John Donne (1572-1631) was an English poet, scholar, and soldier who later became a cleric in the Church of England as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money that he inherited during and after his education on womanizing, literature, pastimes and travel.

In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615 he was ordained Anglican deacon and then priest, although he did not want to take holy orders and only did so because the king ordered it. He served as a member of Parliament.

Donne died on 31 March 1631. He was buried in old St Paul's Cathedral.

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Oppenheimer, John Donne and the Bhagavad Gita

July 16, 1945, Trinity, the first nuclear weapons test.

The film Oppenheimer was a big hit this summer and if you saw the film and especially if you read the book it is based on, American Prometheus, you know that there are some literary references. Two that influenced him were the poetry of John Donne and the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita.

Both were important to him during the Manhattan Project and at the Trinity test. In 1962, Manhattan Project leader Gen. Leslie Groves wrote to Oppenheimer to ask about the origins of the name Trinity. Oppenheimer said, “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love.” 

Oppenheimer quoted the sonnet “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness” which is about a man unafraid to die because he believed in resurrection.

Oppenheimer continued, “That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God.’ Beyond this, I have no clues whatever.”

That second poem,“Batter My Heart,” expresses the paradox that by being chained to God, the narrator can be set free.

Oppenheimer wanted to read the Bhagavad-Gita in the original Sanskrit, the primary sacred language of Hinduism. Before Los Alamos, when he was a professor at Berkeley, he audited Sanskrit classes with Arthur W. Ryder, who had published an English translation of the Bhagavad-Gita.

The "Bhagavad-Gita" expresses a life structured by action. One should detach from desired outcomes and work. Preparing for Trinity, Oppenheimer’s thoughts were on the success of the test and the impact of the bomb on his life and the world. 

As you see in the film, at the Trinity detonation, Oppenheimer was said to have  recalled the line from the book, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” 

However, some critics have said that the quote has been widely misinterpreted. Oppenheimer is not Krishna/Vishnu, not the terrible god, not the ‘destroyer of worlds’ — he is Arjuna, the human prince who didn’t really want to kill his brothers, his fellow people but he has been enjoined to battle by something bigger than himself.

Historian James A. Hijiya wrote that Oppenheimer believed, “It was the duty of the scientists to build the bomb, but it was the duty of the statesman to decide whether or how to use it.”

Before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer sipped coffee, rolled smokes, and read French poet Charles Baudelaire. T.S. Eliot was another poet Oppenheimer admired. He met Eliot when he invited him as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Eliot wrote, “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?”

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: Poems and Song Lyrics

Having gone through high school in the late 1960s, several of the younger English teachers brought popular song lyrics into our poetry lessons to entice us beyond Keats, Frost and the rest of the anthology club.

One of my teachers was a big Simon and Garfunkel fan, as was I. I still recall a lesson reading  "Richard Cory" by E.A. Robinson and then listening to their song version.  My first thought in seeing the original poem was that Simon had basically plagiarized the poem. But Mr. Reece, my teacher, talked about how Paul had changed the point of view to one of Cory's workers, and how that changed the poem for a reader.

In the following weeks, I wrote several terrible songs with my guitar based on poems that I liked. (Never ask me to sing my Frostian "Miles to Go" song.)

The other poem/song combination in that class session was Simon's "I Am a Rock" along with Donne's poem "No Man Is an Island." Here the differences were more obvious. It was more that the Donne poem, and really just one image, acted as a writing prompt for Paul Simon.

Our teachers probably hoped that beyond sparking our interest in poetry, we might make the leap to read more of Robinson or Donne beyond what was in the anthology. I did, though most of my classmates did not.

I liked Robinson's poems, many of which were like short stories.

Songs based on poems are fairly common. There are a good number of direct interpretations as when Natalie Merchant uses poems, such as Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death." 

This month we are going to try writing a poem from an existing song. But we are not looking to imitate the song or even use lines from the song. A better model, though in the reverse direction, might be Paul Simon's "I Am a Rock" which takes inspiration, but does not merely imitate John Donne's poem.

I AM A ROCK

A winter’s day
In a deep and dark December
I am alone
Gazing from my window
To the streets below
On a freshly fallen, silent shroud of snow

I am a rock
I am an island

I’ve built walls
A fortress, steep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain
It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain

Don’t talk of love
Well, I’ve heard the words before
It’s sleeping in my memory
And I won’t disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died
If I never loved, I never would have cried

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me

I am a rock
I am an island

And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries

- Paul Simon





NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

- John Donne


For this prompt, select any song as your inspiration. Indicate at the top or bottom of your poem what song/composer/artist you used. You might select some lines to repurpose. You might use themes from the song in your own poem. The original should serve as a contrasting view or extension to your poem, rather than being just another version of it.

Submission deadline: February 7, 2018 

Good Advice Gone Bad

"You Should Avoid Doctors", says Diane Lockward in our model poem for November. Diane takes it a step further and provides our writing prompt.

"Take a piece of good advice and write a poem in which you argue for its opposite. As in my poem--we're told to go for the yearly physical, to stay in touch with the doctor, but the poem argues just the opposite--stay away from the doctor! There seems to be a bit of a tradition in poetry for this approach - Donne's "Valediction Forbidding Mourning" or Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night". As a writing strategy I find it liberating and exciting to be on the opposite side of the fence. I call it playing Opposite George--after a Seinfeld episode in which George announced that henceforth he'd be doing everything opposite; he'd be " Opposite George". Of course, my beginning point is not of the size that Donne or Thomas used, but I like taking something seemingly insignificant and escalating it. You might choose something like: chew with your mouth closed, don't make waves, play by the rules (you'll come up with better than these, I'm sure). Bonus challenge: Use a body part in the poem."

A first for us - extra credit!

I last saw Diane when the two of us were greeting busloads of high school students and their teachers at this year's Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. She mentioned during our down time that her new book would be out this fall, so I contacted her last month about using something from the collection on Poets Online.

Diane and I met years ago when we were both teaching secondary school English. We have both left those noisy but wonderful hallways, but she still works as a poet-in-the-schools for both the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

She also conducts writing workshops for young and old poets, inexperienced and experienced poets, and for teachers on how to teach poetry, so writing prompts are a part of her repertoire.

I like her wit and wordtwisting - what Thomas Lux calls on the book jacket, "humorous and sometimes heartbreaking...plain-spoken and rich, lush."

Another one of her poems opens this way:

The Missing Wife

Wife and dog missing.
Reward for the dog.
—bumper sticker on a pickup truck

The wife and the dog planned their escape
months in advance, laid up biscuits and bones,
waited for the careless moment when he’d forget
to latch the gate, then hightailed it.
They took shelter in the forest, camouflaged
the scent of their trail with leaves.
Free of him at last,
they peed with relief on a tree.

I have heard Lux, Billy Collins and other poets say that they like "to learn something new" in a poem. I agree. Look how Diane gives us a fact and then sets it ablaze in this stanza from her poem, "Pyromania":

And now I learn that silicone in the breasts
must be excised before cremation
or it blows up, liquefying to a dangerous substance,
destroying the crematorium.
I’d like to have breasts like that—
round and full, earth-tipped and tilted
heavenward, the kind that ignite and explode.
I’d like my breasts to burst into flame,
spreading like wildfire,
tongues of scarlet licking the walls.
I’d like breasts just that white-hot
as once they were under the touch
of my lover, so recently departed.
I’d like to burn the crematorium down.

Have you got some good advice that you think we could turn around for poetic purposes? Even if you can't write the poem, post your advice below in the comments and let someone else take a crack at it.


Diane Lockward is the author of Eve's Red Dress and What Feeds Us (Wind Publications, 2003, 2006). Diane has also been a featured poet at a number of festivals, such as the Warren County Poetry Festival, the Inkberry Festival, the Long Branch Poetry Festival, the Walt Whitman Poetry Festival, and the 2006 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. She was a featured poet at the 2005 Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and a workshop presenter at the New Jersey State Council of Teachers of English Conference in both 2003 and 2006. Her work has recently appeared in The Seattle Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore,and Prairie Schooner, as well as in the anthologies Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times.





Diane's Website is at http://www.dianelockward.com/