The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Smith’s major theme relates to humanity’s place in the grander universe. The daughter of an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, Smith always loved and been fascinated with space. Though most writers who invoke space imagery focus on the vivid and sublime visuals of galaxies, planets, and other celestial bodies, Smith concentrates on the sounds of space. This is a tricky thing to do in a poem because space doesn’t necessarily have discernible sounds. Space is a vacuum, so humans cannot experience sound in space the way they do on Earth. Additionally, only a handful of humans in history have ever been to space, so most people have little connection to the sounds Smith describes.

One way Smith circumvents this difficulty is by grounding her sound descriptions in science, heavily pulling from the science of the cosmic microwave background and from physics to paint the sound of the cosmos. The first three stanzas use figurative language to describe the eerie sounds of cosmic microwave background while attempting to beautify what is, to the human ear, mostly white noise, and nothing more than a deep rumbling.

In these first three stanzas, Smith also turns the action of universal creation into music form, imagining the formation of the cosmos as a music track. This makes the whole poem an extended metaphor that compares music to creation. The first track is lively and full of loud crashes and blaring saxophones: This aligns with the explosive expansion of the Big Bang and early universe. The next track synchronizes with harmonious light strings, signaling the universe falling into order as galaxies and stars and planets form. This synchronous song also contains harsh breaking and dragging noise, as cosmic collisions and eruptions both disrupt and inspire creation.

From there, both white and black noise interrupts the movement as everything falls into its current silence, and the white noise of the echo of the universe’s birth is all that’s left from the beginning. Humanity enters the picture, and the voices of life in the universe have as much staying power and influence as metal shavings stuck in molasses. This demonstrates how little power life has in the vastness of the universe and how stuck in one moment of time humanity is.

Smith’s speaker makes this assessment even clearer when they ridicule humanity’s attempts to conquer space with the flags of countries and the technology of scientists. The speaker almost laughs at the image of astronauts riding rockets into space like cowboys. They criticize humanity’s foolish attempts to stake a claim to the universe, saying people “tried to tame” (Line 8) the universe and implying the endeavor was ultimately a failure.

The poem’s conclusion becomes even more philosophical and complicated. First, the speaker recommends that humanity stop trying to conquer and instead start listening to the music of the cosmos. Smith uses a series of metaphors to describe the sounds of the universe that science has been able to discover with the cosmic microwave background. Here, she compares the universe’s rockets to humanity’s: Whereas before she called human-made rockets tin cans (Line 7), here she calls the universe “a chorus of engines” (Line 10), suggesting not only power but purpose. The universe is a full chorus, synchronized and churning.

The final stanza alludes to the law of conservation of mass. This law essentially says that in a given reaction, mass cannot be created or destroyed. Smith expresses this law in a poetic way, and her phrasing offers a feeling of hopefulness. Smith wrote this poem and the rest of her cosmic poems in Life on Mars shortly after the death of her father; many of the poems in the book are elegiac. The idea of the conservation of mass here refers not only to the lifeless matter of the universe but also to the lifeforce, spiritual energy, memory, and existence of humans. It’s as if Smith is consoling herself as she mourns her father’s death by saying even though he is gone, he has disappeared “as if returning somewhere” (Line 12). This thought suggests an almost spiritual belief in reincarnation and in the comforting thought that even when loved ones die, they are still nearby in another form.

This final assertion that nothing ever really disappears connects with the poem’s earlier use of the cosmic microwave background and the creation of the universe. The cosmic microwave background is an echo of the Big Bang, but unlike normal echoes that pass a listener’s ears and forever vanish, this echo will never end. It will perpetually expand outward, just as the universe will perpetually expand. Similarly, one way people experience space and time is through light. When looking into the night sky, people are looking into the past. The images of the past will never actually fade—they will just continue to travel across space while every object drifts further and further away from every other object.

The idea here is that what people see and hear are echoes of the past, and through the experiencing of these sensations, the past is never truly gone. It perpetuates even though it has ended.