Each interacts with each, each has a place

From Sonnets From Later Life 1981 – 1993. 28 March and 13 March 1992

Sonnet for the Noösphere

by Kenneth Boulding

I

All my life I have been teacher and taught,

Working to transfer into other minds

Ideas and images that searching finds

In the wide landscape of my inner thought.

And this to me has much contentment brought.

I could have lived long lives of other kinds,

And yet, somehow, the stream of life that winds

Through space and time has not borne me for naught.

The final purpose of the universe

Is not for us to know: but here and now 

We know that we can nourish and endow, 

From the rich content of our own mind’s purse, 

The knowledge universe that grows and spreads 

Through past, present, and future human heads. 

II 

Our precious earth is made of many spheres, 

Rocks, water, life, and the human race; 

Each interacts with each, each has a place, 

Endlessly changing with the passing years. 

But now, something remarkable appears; 

A sphere of knowledge, images that trace 

Through human minds the patterns that lace 

The real world; small?--large! And distant?--near! 

But knowledge, like all things, passes away, 

As we forget, and as we ourselves die, 

And must be born, in young minds, constantly, 

By teaching, learning , thinking, testing, play. 

And to extinction will frail knowledge go, 

Unless they who know, teach, and who teach, know.