John Crider's website is very good. But as so often the Internet rather takes the fun out of things (daft, perhaps, to be saying that on a website like this one). It seems to have brought this thread more or less to a halt. Abebooks.com, for instance, is a great invention, but it has certainly taken the fun out of poking around in dusty old second-hand bookshops; you no longer get that sense of a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.

But after all this Luddite (or just old codger's) grumbling, I should add that I checked the website out and found that it didn't include this poem by Wilbur (nor, for that matter, the Sesame Street lyric, which was fun):

Flumen Tenebrarum

This night's colossal quiet, in heaven crowned
Immovable, at earth is slipped swift
With shore grasses' wind-ushering sound,
With the river's folding drift,

With our own vanishing voices as we go
By the stream side, watching our shadows dangled
Down the bank to the flood, trailed in the flow
And all in stars entangled.

There is the hunter hulking up the night
Who waded once the wildest of our seas,
With foiled eyes marking the still flight
Of the faint Pleiades.

And here are we, who hold each other now
So nearly, that our welded shadows seem,
There where they fall away, a ghostly prow
Steering into the stream.

As if to kiss were someway to embark;
As if to love were partly to be spent,
And send of us a hostage to the dark.
If so, I am content,

And would not have my lively longing freeze,
Nor your delays, in figures of the sky,
Since none outlasts the stream, and even these
Must come to life and die.

The hunter shall be tumbled in this tide,
Worse stricken than by Dian's steepest arrow,
And all his fire shall gutter out beside
This old embarcadero;

Those nymphs, so long preserved, at last be lost,
Be borne again along this blackening race,
And with their lover swept away, and tossed
In scintillant embrace.

Hi,

I came across Martyn Crucefix's work when he was judge at last year's Ware Poets competition. He read this poem and I was very taken by it. His current book, An English Nazareth, is very fine.

On night's estate

This is the world as it will be in one hour,
if what I see is all that counts.
And as if it is, the longer I look,
the blacked-out expanses
grow more hard to stare into.

Unlike the United States, unsheathing
its gleaming Floridan sword,
its rash of yellow citidots.
The earth is on fire
south of the Great Lakes' blue pools.
Grows more black, but not empty,
out through standing
mid-west corn, block on starry block,
swept to the Pacific's violet edge.

There, shy Australia lies on display.
A single lemon necklace,
loose from Brisbane to Adelaide.
The monumental Asiatic blacks,
their spilt drops of gold
spattering Europe, where it grows
lighter from east to west.
The cobra-squirm of the Nile,
is a slithering focus to a blazing delta.

We are those who show ourselves
most clearly when we sleep.
We become like children,
sprawled, unconscious and equal
to the next lamplight.
The world in numerable parts.
Our dreams, a ferocious inequality,
as no-one lives in the Icelandic
inky black, the soot-back of Canada,
the Arctic, ebony of Antarctica,
the emptied Amazon basin,
the Russian steppes, Himalayan pitch.

Whatever life goes on there,
it keeps such a quiet light.
A few red sores of flaming oil-fields.
The indigo of burning forest
in the bulb of Brazil.
And across central Africa,
fat Africa is the body of dark
I hear cry out the kind of catastrophe
it must take to revive the night's wrap.
Let darkness fall as it now appears.
Beneath the close of twelve billion lids,
the monster is asleep and dreams of stars.

Catherine, you should be ashamed of yourself!

The Galaxy Song
by Eric Idle

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the "Milky Way".

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

Sam, not everybody got the complete Monty Python on DVD last Christmas! It is a great one, though.

And so is the Sesame Street song, which reliably makes me weepy, to Sophie's bafflement. But I think it needs the melody for its greatness to be fully appreciated.

Gregory, thanks for posting the Wilbur poem, which I don't recall seeing before.


Stargazing at Barton

For the child who leans out over
the sill, mindful of the curtains,
may these stars be names remembered:
Taurus, Orion, and The Bear--
tranquil distances and moon-hung
bazaars the gods once frequented.

When Pascal speaks of "nothingness
from which we're drawn, infinity
in which we're swallowed up," he does
not mean this mid-August sky, this
quiet of meadows that has the
power to calm us. The alder

in the yard rattles in the wind;
and, from the woods, the rumble and
rush of a brook. Surely, we live
and care how we live. Undimin-
ished by our old contemplation,
the starlight remains fugitive

and beautiful, if only for
the child who loves it as it is,
who sees, leaning across the sill,
Taurus, Orion, and The Bear,
masters of their ancient distance,
bright and fading, immutable.

--Timothy Steele

Insomnia

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

--- Elizabeth Bishop


Planetarium

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848),
astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

a woman 'in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles'

in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

She whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled


in those spaces.......... of the mind

An eye,
'virile, precise and absolutely certain'
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last
'Let me not seem to have lived in vain'

What we see, we see
and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.

--- Adrienne Rich

VII - Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.

The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault ;
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt.

A. E. Housman

CELESTIAL GLOBE

This is the world
Without the world.
I hold it in my hand,
A hollow sphere
Of childlike blue
With magnitudes of stars.
There in its utter dark
The singing planets go,
And the sun, great source,
Is blazing forth his fires
Over the many-oceaned
And river-shining earth
Whereon I stand
Balancing this ball
Upon my hand.

It is the universe,
The Turning One.
As if children at the Museum
Should watch some amateur
Copying Rembrandt's painting
Of Aristotle contemplating
The skull of Homer, that
Dark fire fountaining forth
The twin poems of the war
And of the journey home -
As if the children stood
In the mind of Homer
As on the ball of the world
Where every inside's out.

It is the world
Beyond the world.
Holding it in my hand,
I wear it on my head
As a candle wears a pumpkin
At Halloween, when children
Rise as the dead; only
It has no human features,
No access to its depths
Whatever, where it keeps
In the utter dark
The candle of the sun,
The candle of the mind,
Twin fires that together
Turn all things inside out.

(Howard Nemerov)

And here's an address to the moon from the early 19th century, by that great lyric-depressive, Giacomo Leopardi. I offer it for anyone wanting to try their hand at translating (how about it, Catherine?).

Alla luna

O graziosa luna, io mi rammento
che, or volge l'anno, sovra questo colle
io venia pien d'angoscia a rimirarti:
e tu pendevi allor su quella selva
siccome or fai, che tutta la rischiari.
Ma nebuloso e tremulo dal pianto
che mi sorgea sul ciglio, alle mie luci
il tuo volto apparia, che travagliosa
era mia vita: ed è, né cangia stile,
o mia diletta luna. E pur mi giova
la ricordanza, e il noverar l'etate
del mio dolore. Oh come grato occorre
nel tempo giovanil, quando ancor lungo
la speme e breve ha la memoria il corso,
il rimembrar delle passate cose,
ancor che triste, e che l'affanno duri!

Leopardi obviously felt a strong kinship with the moon; he wrote an even finer poem about it, “Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia” (Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia), but it's too long to paste in here.

I really enjoyed the Timothy Steele. Thanks Catherine.

Edited now that this thread's been relaunched just to say that if anybody is curious about the Leopardi, I posted a translation of it about a month ago on the Translation forum.

[This message has been edited by Gregory Dowling (edited May 16, 2005).]

Hi,

When I was at last year's Ware Poets awards the entries were judged by the British poet Martyn Crucefix. He read his astronomical poem - On night's estate. I was rather taken by it.

On night's estate

This is the world as it will be in one hour,
if what I see is all that counts.
And as if it is, the longer I look,
the blacked-out expanses
grow more hard to stare into.

Unlike the United States, unsheathing
its gleaming Floridan sword,
its rash of yellow citidots.
The earth is on fire
south of the Great Lakes' blue pools.
Grows more black, but not empty,
out through standing
mid-west corn, block on starry block,
swept to the Pacific's violet edge.

There, shy Australia lies on display.
A single lemon necklace,
loose from Brisbane to Adelaide.
The monumental Asiatic blacks,
their spilt drops of gold
spattering Europe, where it grows
lighter from east to west.
The cobra-squirm of the Nile,
is a slithering focus to a blazing delta.

We are those who show ourselves
most clearly when we sleep.
We become like children,
sprawled, unconscious and equal
to the next lamplight.
The world in numerable parts.
Our dreams, a ferocious inequality,
as no-one lives in the Icelandic
inky black, the soot-back of Canada,
the Arctic, ebony of Antarctica,
the emptied Amazon basin,
the Russian steppes, Himalayan pitch.

Whatever life goes on there,
it keeps such a quiet light.
A few red sores of flaming oil-fields.
The indigo of burning forest
in the bulb of Brazil.
And across central Africa,
fat Africa is the body of dark
I hear cry out the kind of catastrophe
it must take to revive the night's wrap.
Let darkness fall as it now appears.
Beneath the close of twelve billion lids,
the monster is asleep and dreams of stars.



[This message has been edited by Alan Wickes (edited March 04, 2005).]

Wonderful collection. I especially enjoyed the Housman poems. It seems impossible to think of poetry making use of science without thinking of Pattiann Rogers. Here's one of hers on starlight:

Another Little God
- Pattiann Rogers

You don't know how important
it might be – the blue-white light
from a star like Vege caught in the eydots
of nocturnal grass frogs and yellow-bellied
toads, caught in the senses of fishing
bats, mouse-tailed bats.

And I can't say either how much
it might matter – that same pin
of light multiplied by each reflective
grain of crystal sand along a beach
beside the Gulf, held by each slide
and scissor of beak rushes
in a southern marsh.

Maybe particles and spears of light
from Vega penetrate the earth, descend
through silt and loam, touching,
even enlivening, even partially defining
the microscopic roots of bellflowers,
purple vetches and peas, the creases
and shackled of worm snakes and grubs.

The translucent eggs of the plumed moth,
the fins of the redbelly dace might need
a star's blue-white light, like water,
like air. Breath might require it,
breathing starlight into the heart.
You don't know. After all, we've never
lived without it.

If starlight spears through each oily
sperm link of reedbuck and potto,
if it enters every least bulb
of snow flea, wheel bug, hay
louse, if it corridors through all bone
crystals, around each spurl and bole
of the brain, inside timbre and voice,
piercing the whole stone and space
of believe, then, if only for one
complete name under the sky tonight,
lie still and remember.

The Two-Headed Calf

Tommorow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.

—Laura Gilpin
from The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe