- Possession's eleventh chapter gives us a long excerpt from Randolph Henry Ash's poem "Swammerdam," which is the poem that Blanche Glover stole.
- The poem is a dramatic monologue that's written from the perspective of the seventeenth-century biologist Jan Swammerdam.
- Ash's poetic Swammerdam is on death's door, and as he lies on his deathbed he dictates his will and recounts his life to the unnamed man who tends to him. As he talks, readers hear all about the discoveries he made as he studied the lives of insects and microorganisms.
- As Randolph Henry Ash implies, Swammerdam's groundbreaking research into the tiniest of living bodies were just as earth-shattering as earlier scientists' discoveries about the solar system.