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.