Now we look at Mars and the thrill of discovery. U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky gives us a text.
Discovery is a feeling, as well as a fact.
It s a feeling that people who work here at the Observatory of Boston s Museum of Science can see in a kid s face when the kid looks in the telescope and sees the rings of Saturn. It s a feeling many of us have had as we see the pictures from Mars and follow the news from Mars. Looking for that feeling somewhere in poetry, I turned to the English 16th century, which was a period where the Europeans were writing poems at the time of great discovery.