Lois Letchford - People Who've Changed the World - Poem: The Microscope

10 Jul 2021 · 2 min

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1:54

In this solo YouTube video, Lois Letchford—author of Reversed: A Memoir and founder of Teaching Students with Dyslexia—introduces a segment of her "People Who Changed the World" series. She presents Maxine Kumin’s humorous poem "The Microscope," which celebrates Dutch tradesman‑turned‑microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. The poem narrates Leeuwenhoek’s shift from selling dry goods to grinding lenses, his observations of tiny organisms in water droplets, and the skeptical reactions of his contemporaries, who labeled him a fool. Lois frames the poem as one of her favorites, encourages viewers to verify the historical facts about Leeuwenhoek by searching YouTube and Google, and ends with a standard call to like, share, and subscribe.

Chapters

Hello, I'm Lois Letchford. I'm author of the book Reversed: A Memoir. I'm founder of Teaching Students with Dyslexia, and I'm reading about people who changed the world. And today I have a poem for you, short poem, very funny to me. It's very funny, and it's called The Microscope. Antonie Leeuwenhoek was Dutch. He sold pincushions, cloth, and such. The waiting townsfolk fumed and fussed as Anton's dry goods gathered dust. He worked instead of tending store at grinding special lenses for his microscope. Some of the things he looked at were mosquitoes' wings, the hair of sheep, the legs of lice, the skin of people, dogs, and mice, ox's eyes, spider's spinny gear, fish's scales, a little smear of his own blood, and best of all, The unknown, busy, very small bugs that swim and jump and hop inside a simple water drop. Impossible! Most Dutchmen said. This Anton's crazy in the head. We ought to ship him off to Spain. He said he's seen a housefly's brain. He says the water that we drink is full of bugs. He's mad, we think. They called him Dummklopf, which means dope. That's how we got the microscope. Questions for you. Is this true? Is this false? Is Antonie van Leeuwenhoek an actual scientist? What did he do? Find out. Check YouTube. Check Google. See what you can come up and find out about Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. And this poem was written by Maxine Kuman And it's one of my absolute favorites. Thank you. Like, share, subscribe.