William Blake's poem "Mock On, Mock On..." discusses Blake's feelings about the findings and beliefs of scientists. He believes scientists "mock" the sacred religious world he holds dear when they attempt to understand it with science. He describes the "The Atoms of Democritus/And Newton's Particles of Light" as merely "sands upon the Red Sea shore," the sacred shore, "where Israel's tents to shine so bright."
In Anna Laetitia Barbauld's "Inscription for an Ice House," she describes the wonders of science and its ability to control and confine nature. She describes an ice house, the latest marvel from the hands of science, as a prison that keeps Winter trapped inside all year long. Science, then, is a tool used by man not only to understand nature but to control it.
Robert Frost's "Birches" is a poem about longing for the days before material science. It describes the way birch trees bend towards the ground, a phenomenon that has been explained by material science to be the result of "ice storms." The poem's speaker, however, wishes that science would not explain the way the world works in such dull terms but instead wishes for a world in which he could explain these events in a non-scientific way, like a boy swinging on birch trees and pulling them to the ground.