A poem of Greg di Prinzio's on TDE set me thinking about others which address astronomical themes. (Have a feeling we had a similar thread a year or two ago but it's probably been deleted.)

Here's one I rather like by the Irish poet, Moya Cannon

NIGHT

Coming back from Cloghane
in the sudden frost
of a November night,
I was ambushed
by the river of stars.

Disarmed by lit skies
I had utterly forgotten
this arc of darkness,
this black night
where the frost-hammered stars
were notes thrown from a chanter,
crans of light.

So I wasn't ready
for the dreadful glamour of Orion
as he struck out over Barr dTri gCom
in his belt of stars.

At Gleann na nGealt
his bow of stars
was drawn against my heart.

What could I do?

Rather than drive into a pitch-black ditch
I got out twice,
leaned back against the car
and stared up at our windy, untidy loft
where old people had flung up junk
they'd thought might come in handy,
ploughs, ladles, bears, lions, a clatter of heroes,
a few heroines, a path for the white cow, a swan
and, low down, almost within reach,
Venus, completely unfazed by the frost.

That feels almost like two separate poems to me. I love the junk thrown up into the sky bit.

I think we may have had a scientific poetry thread that had astronomy in it. Am not sure about an astronomy thread per se... I'll rumage around in the attic and see.

Housman has quite a few poems that hinge on astronomy. He was of course the editor of the astronomical poet Manilius, but apparently his interest in the heavens dates from early childhood.

This is one of my favorite--though lesser-known--AEH poems. (Also quite unusual for him in being ip.) You have to have a sort of 3-D mental picture of the earth and the sun's light hitting it to fully appreciate the imagery.

Revolution

West and away the wheels of darkness roll,
Day's beamy banner up the east is borne,
Spectres and fears, the nighmare and her foal,
Drown in the golden deluge of the morn.

But over sea and continent from sight
Safe to the Indies has the earth conveyed
The vast and moon-eclipsing cone of night,
Her towering foolscap of eternal shade.

See, in mid heaven the sun is mounted; hark,
The belfries tingle to the noonday chime.
'Tis silent, and the subterranean dark
Has crossed the nadir, and begins to climb.

And of course there's this one:


When I heard the learned astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman

One of my favorite poems:

On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations
by Robert Frost

You'll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
It is true the longest drought will end in rain,
The longest peace in China will end in strife.
Still it wouldn't reward the watcher to stay awake
In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break
On his particular time and personal sight.
That calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.

And of course:

BRIGHT STAR, WOULD I WERE STEDFAST
by John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art---
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors---
No---yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever---or else swoon in death.

Now here is FV working at its best:

The Great Explosion

Robinson Jeffers


The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies,
dust clouds and nebulae
Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one
harbor, they stick in one lump
And then explode it, nothing can hold them down ; there is no
way to express that explosion; all that exists
Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each
other into all the sky, new universes
Jewel the black breast of night ; and far off the outer nebulae
like charging spearmen again
Invade emptiness.
No wonder we are so fascinated with
fireworks
And our huge bombs : it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for
the howling fireblast that we were born from.

But the whole sum of the energies
That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will
gather again and pile up, the power and the glory --
And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole : the
whole universe beats like a heart.
Peace in our time was never one of God's promises ; but back
and forth, live and die, burn and be damned,
The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His
terrible life.

He is beautiful beyond belief.
And we, God's apes -- or tragic children -- share in the beauty.
We see it above our torment, that's what life's for.
He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's
Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments, : this is the God who does not care
and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness --look at the
tide-stream stars -- and the fall of nations -- and dawn
Wandering with wet white feet down the Caramel Valley to
meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor -- I know not
-- of faceless violence, the root of all things.


Robinson Jeffers

Great topic for a thread!


The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.


--W.H. Auden

Stargazing

The night is fine and dry. It falls and spreads
the cold sky with a million opposites
that, for a moment, seem like a million souls
and soon, none, and then, for as long time,
one. Then of course it spins. What better to do
than string out over the infinite dead spaces
the ancient beasts and spearmen of the human
mind, and, if not the real ones, new ones?

But, try making them clear to one you love -
whoever is standing by you is one you love
when pinioned by the stars - you will find it quite
impossible, but like her more for thinking
she sees that constellation.

After the wave of pain, you will turn to her
and, in an instant, change the universe
to a sky you were glad you came outside to see.

This is the act of all the descended gods
of every age and creed: to weary of all
that never ends, to take a human hand,
and go back into the house.

Glyn Maxwell

Can't remember your favorite astronomical poem? Tired of the same old, used one? Or just need an upgrade? I just found this wonderful website, Noxoculi:

http://pages.infinit.net/noxoculi/poetry.html

Scroll down a little and there's a nice selection of (old and newer) poems in English.


John



[This message has been edited by J.A. Crider (edited February 16, 2005).]

I don't know if these Sesame Street lyrics hold up on their own, but they're pretty great when Aaron Neville joins Ernie in singing them:

Visit The Moon

Oh I'd like to visit the moon
on a rocket ship high in the air.
Yes, I'd like to visit the moon,
but I don't think I'd like to live there.

Though I'd like to look down on the earth from above
I would miss all the places and people I love,
so though I would like it for one afternoon
I don't want to live on the moon.

I'd like to travel under the sea.
I would meet all the fish everywhere.
Yes I'd like to travel under the sea,
but I don't think I'd like to live there.

I would stay for a day there if I had my wish,
but there's not much to do when your friends are all fish,
and an oyster and clam aren't real family.
No, I don't want to live in the sea.

I'd like to visit the jungle, hear the lions roar,
go back in time and meet a dinosaur.
There's so many strange places I'd like to be,
but none of them permanently.

So if I should visit the moon,
I would dance on a moonbeam and then
I would make a wish on a star
and I'd wish I was home once again.

Though I'd like to look down on the earth from above,
I would miss all the places and people I love.
So though I may go, I'll be coming home soon,
'cause I don't want to live on the moon.
No I don't want to live on the moon.



[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited February 18, 2005).]

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

Tom,

I wonder if Gilpin's poem is a distilled rip-off or a comment on James Dickey's "The Sheep-Child":


"Farm boys wild to couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth mounds
Of pine straw" etc
*

"... I have heard tell
That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There's this thing that's only half
Sheep like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol" etc
*

"...the sheep-child may
Be saying saying...

I who am half of your world, came deeply
To my mother in the long grass
Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight
Listening for foxes. It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind..." etc. etc.

Southern Gothic, no?




[This message has been edited by J.A. Crider (edited March 16, 2005).]

I doubt it. Gilpin, as far as I know, only put out one volume of poetry, but it won the first Walt Whitman award (which is one of the most prestigious of the American poetry prizes awarded specifically for a first volume by a poet who has yet to publish a book of poems). So while she may have been influenced by Dickey--he was A Big Name at the time she was probably writing these--I don't think she ripped him off.

In fact, I've been reading a book of interviews with Andy Warhol. He says that at the beginning of the 60s, at the height of abstract expressionism several painters who later formed the core of the Pop movement, started using commercial art motifs and cartoons as the basis for paintings. None of the artists knew each other--it was, as Warhol explains, just something in the air at the time.

In any case, Gilpin was one of the first poets I absolutely loved, and I've always loved that poem.

But here is another, one I'm surprised hasn't been posted yet:

Words

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road---

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

—Sylvia Plath

I too was instantly put in mind of "The Sheep-Child" (a poem I like very much, probably partly because I remember going to the quirky museum at the Atlanta Capitol as a kid and seeing suchlike pickled critters--particulalry a two-headed snake), but "The Two-Headed Calf," which I did not know before, has its own charm. Thanks for posting it.

Plath's "Words" with its pool of fixed stars put me in mind of this famous star poem:

Lucifer in Starlight

ON a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugg'd their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reach'd a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

--George Meredith


It's a poem we all know, but I still get the shivers from it. I love the "black planet" casting its shadow, and stars being "the brain of heaven." And of course, the terrific last line which goosesteps its iambs through every syllable of "unalterable".

Tom,

I was being half-provocative with my rip-off line. I actually think she was consciously writing a coda to Dickey’s poem—-imagining the brief, but astonishingly beautiful moments when the just-birthed “sheep-child” or “two-headed calf” is still alive and breathing in the pasture; before the farm boys take it to a museum.

Or else, if we take the simultaneous combustion theory of artistic creation (rather than one of contiguous influences) we should ask what was happening in the world of Dickey and Gilpin and others (i.e. Flannery O’Connor) that would make similar motifs (“freaks of nature”) pop-up with frequency in southern literature after 1950. The transformation of the rural south, or indeed any rural agricultural area, would be a likely context, I think. Pressures of modernization/capitalism can impinge so utterly on agricultural life-ways that shame and guilt at not being able to survive (as a people or a culture) could easily drift down deeper into self-deprecation or suspicions of genetic weakness (all those jokes about inbreeding etc.)—for which a deformed animal would be an apt literary emblem. (I’m launching far a-field from astronomy here, but I’ve been reading this lovely novel by George Sessions Perry, "Hold Autumn in Your Hand" (1941), set in rural Texas, which I heartily recommend to anyone who likes or dislikes "The Grapes of Wrath")

That abstract expressionists would individually co-opt commercial and popular iconography in the 1950s makes perfect sense, given the boom in advertising and the quantification of mass media following WWII.

Is Laura Gilpin the poet, the same Laura Gilpin the photographer?

The Plath poem is beautiful, Tom. Her ability to distill an image down to a “psychological correlative” is consistently amazing. (BTW, J. Kristeva talks about this poem with reference to the aphasia-like symptoms of deep depression in her essay “About Chinese Women”).


John

Alicia,

Thanks for posting the Meredith poem, which I think may be even more astronomical than people think. I’ve been sitting on a point of explication since I was undergraduate, so I might as well chime in here.

Brooks & Warren famously explicated the poem in their <u>Understanding Poetry</u> (1938, pp. 493-99), emphasizing its mythic and thematic dialogue with Milton’s <u>Paradise Lost.</u> It’s a sturdy and rich reading, but their attempt to recreate the “logical steps” in Meredith’s composing “Lucifer in Starlight” met with resistance by scholars. One professor, John W. Morris, found the “germ” of the sonnet in Meredith’s own novel <u>The Ordeal of Richard Feverel</u>. Another, John Lucas, asked of “Lucifer in Starlight”:


"Why are the stars the brain of Heaven? (Do they hold intelligences, if so what sort, if not is the image meant to be visual?) What is the army of unalterable law? Who is Lucifer? (At the beginning of the sonnet he seems to be Satan, but if he is, why is he defeated by [just] the sight of this un-Christian army?) To these and other questions Brooks and Warren try to provide answers, but I think they get too far from the words on the page to be really convincing. It is not that I wish to deny the poem a certain skill, but I simply cannot see that it has a genuine subject.”


That’s pretty harsh even by Brian Phillips' standards. Lucas could have added another question: “Why is Lucifer a black planet?” The answer to which would be because Lucifer is a planet: “The planet Venus in its appearance as the morning star (<u>The American Heritage Dictionary</u>). Here is an authored text that Milton and Meredith both knew, Luke 14:12: “How are thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.” And here is one that only Meredith could have known, by the nineteenth-century popular writer on astronomy, R.A. Proctor: “…it is by passing between the sun and the earth that the evening star changes into the morning star, while it is by passing beyond the sun, so that the sun comes between the earth and her, that Venus changes from morning to evening star” (“The Past and Coming Transits” in <u>Cornhill Magazine</u>, Vol. 31, January 1875).

A little more digging yields up this historical coincidence: Meredith’s poem was first published in the volume “Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth” in 1883; and one of the premier astronomical events of the century, a transit of Venus, occurred on December 6, 1882. Actually there were two transits of Venus, an earlier one occurred on Dec. 8, 1874. Observatories all over the world prepared to capture the best views. At Greenwich, the forecast was unfavorable: “Wind shifting to N.East, moderate, cloudy generally with occasional showers of snow or sleet…” (<u>London Times</u> Dec. 6). But British astronomers in Madagascar and Cape Colony observed “the early ingress.” Astronomers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, including one Dr. Doolittle (father of the poet H.D.), fared better, acquiring useful measurements. The <u>London Times</u> goes on to give some expository details about Venus: “…there is an atmosphere surrounding the planet, which is illumined by the sun, presenting the appearance of a narrow ring or arc around the black body of Venus" (itals mine). One thing you can say about Meredith, he read the newspapers.

To the best of my knowledge this has never elicited scholarly comment, and I’m quite sure that the germ of the poem was occasioned as much by this astronomical event as by an intellectual engagement with Milton. In fact, I think here is a classic case of “both” rather than “either/or,” and it may have implications for interpretating the poem. At the least, it solidifies a reading of Victorian agnostic scientism vs. Miltonic Christian mythology skirmishing in the poem.

That Meredith might have dashed off an occasional poem circa December 1882, have it published the following year, and for it to become one of the best-known sonnets in English, is remarkable to me. Another interesting scenario, however, would have the genesis of the poem prompted by the 1874 transit, then have it ripen and age in the vat for 8 years until the 1882 transit occasioned its release to the public. It’s worth noting that the date of the earlier transit, December 8, 1874, is just one day before Milton’s birthday in the bicentennial year of his death. A doubly-occasioned poem, perhaps.

Well, that feels good to get that moving off my plate, finally. I’ll spare you my thoughts on how Donne’s “Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,/Men reckon what it did and meant…” is not only about earthquakes and orbital interference between planets, so much as it’s about the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy. Another day, perhaps.


John A. Crider



[This message has been edited by J.A. Crider (edited March 18, 2005).]

Somehow John's excellent insights into this poem escaped me first time round (possibly due to baby-induced sleep deprivation). Lucifer is certainly a title of the planet Venus as morning star, and this seems eminently plausible, and even probable, given the dates. You ought to dig around a little more and see what you can find and publish it. I think VERY often what seems a curious metaphor at a remove from the poem ends up being based on a literal truth to the poet. (Actually a pet theory of mine.)

As for stars being the brains of heaven and the army of unalterable law, this sounds very Stoical and Manillian to me. Certainly again astronomical (by way of philosophy) as well as Miltonic.

On a related topic, I am also boosting this back up to the top because I have been looking for a poem by Robert Frost, the Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus, and wonder if some kind soul would be willing to post it here. I do not seem to have it among my books and do not have access to a library. I would be very grateful.

Here 't is, Alicia:


THE LITERATE FARMER AND THE PLANET VENUS

A dated popular-science medley on a mysterious light
recently observed in the western sky at evening

My unexpected knocking at the door
Started chairs thundering on the kitchen floor,
Knives and forks ringing on the supper plates,
Voices conflicting like the candidates.
A mighty farmer flung the house door wide,
He and a lot of children came outside,
And there on an equality we stood.
That's the time knocking at a door did good.

<dd>"I stopped to compliment you on this star
You get the beauty of from where you are.
To see it so, the bright and only one
In sunset light, you'd think it was the sun
That hadn't sunk the way it should have sunk,
But right in heaven was slowly being shrunk
So small as to be virtually gone,
Yet there to watch the darkness coming on--
Like someone dead permitted to exist
Enough to see if he was greatly missed.
I didn't see the sun set. Did it set?
Will anybody swear that isn't it?
And will you give me shelter for the night?
If not, a glass of milk will be all right."

<dd>"Traveler, I'm glad you asked about that light.
You mind mistrusted there was something wrong,
And naturally you couldn't go along
Without inquiring if 'twas serious.
'Twas providential you applied to us,
Who were just on the subject when you came.
There is a star that Serious by name
And nature too, but this is not the same.
This light's been going on for several years,
Although at times we think it disappears.
You'll hear all sorts of things. You'll meet with them
Will tell you it's the star of Bethlehem
Above some more religion in a manger.
But put that down to superstition, Stranger.
What's a star doing big as a baseball?
Between us two it's not a star at all.
It's a new patented electric light,
Put up on trial by that Jerseyite
So much is being now expected of,
To give developments the final shove
And turn us into the next specie folks
Are going to be, unless these monkey jokes
Of the last fifty years are all a libel,
And Darwin's proved mistaken, not the Bible.
I s'pose you have your notions on the vexed
Question of what we're turning into next."

<dd>"As liberals we're willing to give place
To any demonstrably better race,
No matter what ther color of its skin.
(But what a human race the white has been!)
I heard a fellow in a public lecture
On Pueblo Indians and their architecture
Declare that if such Indians inherited
The cóndemned world the legacy was merited.
So far as he, the speaker, was concerned
He had his ticket bought, his passage earned,
To take the Mayflower back where he belonged,
Before the Indian race was further wronged.
But come, enlightened as in talk you seem,
You don't believe that that first-water gleam
Is not a star?"

<dd><dd>"Believe it? Why, I know it.
Its actions any cloudless night will show it.
You'll see it be allowed up just so high,
Say about halfway up the western sky,
And then get slowly, slowly pulled back down.
You might not notice if you've lived in town,
As I suspect you have. A town debars
Much notice of what's going on in stars.
The idea is no doubt to make one job
Of lighting the whole night with one big blob
Of electricity in bulk the way
The sun sets the example in the day."

<dd>"Here come more stars to character the skies,
And they in the estimation of the wise
Are more divine than any bulb or arc,
Because their purpose is to flash and spark,
But not to take away the precious dark.
We need the interruption of the night
To ease attention off when overtight,
To break our logic in too long a flight,
And ask us if our premises are right."

<dd>"Sick talk, sick talk, sick sentimental talk!
It doesn't do you any good to talk.
It see what you are: can't get you excited
With hopes of getting mankind unbenighted.
Some ignorance takes rank as innocence.
Have it for all of me and have it dense.
The slave will never thank his manumitter:
Which often makes the manumitter bitter."

<dd>"In short, you think the star a patent medicine
Put up to cure the world by Mr. Edison."

<dd>"You said it--that's exactly what it is.
My son in Jersey says a friend of his
Knows the old man, and nobody's so deep
In incandescent lamps and ending sleep.
The old man argues science cheapened speed.
A good cheap anti-dark is now the need.
Give us a good cheap twenty-four-hour day,
No part of which we'd have to waste, I say,
And who knows where we can't get! Wasting time
In sleep or slowness is the deadly crime.
He gave up sleep himself some time ago,
It puffs the face and brutalizes so.
You take the ugliness all so much dread,
Called getting out of the wrong side of bed.
That is the source perhaps of human hate
And well may be where wars originate.
Get rid of that and there'd be left no great
Of either murder or war in any land.
You know how cunningly mankind is planned:
We have one loving and one hating hand.
The loving's made to hold each other like,
While with the hating other hand we strike.
The blow can be no stronger than the clutch,
Or soon we'd bat each other out of touch,
And the fray wouldn't last a single round.
And still it's bad enough to badly wound,
And if our getting up to start the day
On the right side of bed would end the fray,
We'd hail the remedy. But it's been tried
And found, he says, a bed has no right side.
The trouble is, with that receipt for love,
A bed's got no right side to get out of.
We can't be trusted to the sleep we take,
And simply must evolve to stay awake.
He thinks that chairs and tables will endure,
But beds--in less than fifty years he's sure
There will be no such piece of furniture.
He's surely got it in for cots and beds.
No need for us to rack our common heads
About it, though. We haven't got the mind.
It best be left to great men of his kind
Who have no other object than our good.
There's a lot yet that isn't understood.
Ain't it a caution to us not to fix
No limits to what rose in rubbing sticks
On fire to scare away the pterodix
When man first lived in caves along the creeks?"

<dd>"Marvelous world in nineteen-twenty-six."

<dd><dd><dd>--by Robert Frost

(Edited to correct typos.)



[This message has been edited by Patricia A. Marsh (edited May 13, 2005).]

It’s great fun seeing some of these older threads put up (for whatever reason – hope more moderators will continue to do this), and this one really includes some wonderful poems, especially the beautiful Cannon poem Margaret began with back in February.



[This message has been edited by B.J. Preston (edited June 27, 2005).]

Patricia, thanks so much! I owe you one.

Thanks, Preston, for the Ackermann.

Belated thanks to all,

Margaret.

If the moon counts on this thread,
Frost has a lovely little poem entitled, "Moon Compasses." I'm remote from my library and wouldn't dare cite it. The last line is "So love would take between the hands a face."

Maybe someone can dig it and post it.

Bob

Here ya go, Bob:


<dd><dd>MOON COMPASSES

I stole forth dimly in the dripping pause
Between two downpours to see what there was.
And a masked moon had spread down compass rays
To a cone mountain in the midnight haze,
As if the final estimate were hers;
And as it measured in her calipers,
The mountain stood exalted in its place.
So love will take between the hands a face. . . .

[This message has been edited by Patricia A. Marsh (edited May 16, 2005).]

And, on a lighter note:


[indent]<dd>MY STARS

On the day I was born,
The unalterable stars altered.
If I decided to sell lamps,
It wouldn't get dark till the day I died.

Some stars. Whatever I do,
I'm a failure before I begin.
If I suddenly decided to sell shrouds,
People would suddenly stop dying.

<dd><dd><dd>by Abraham ibn Ezra
<dd><dd><dd>Translated by Robert Mezey

I'm grateful to make the acquaintance of both these Frost poems. And belated thanks to John, for the fascinating astronomical background to Meredith.

Heavenly thread! Here's a bit of Charles Martin's graceful Ovid:

Under western skies
are meadows where the horses of the Sun
are pastured, feeding on divine ambrosia
instead of ordinary grass; and here,
exhausted by their efforts of the day,
this nourishment sustains them and renews
their vigor for the labors of the morrow.

And while his horses browse on their immortal
pasturage, and Night goes to work, the Sun
takes on the form of Leucothoe's mother,
Eurynome, and slips into her bedroom;
lamplight reveals his darling with her servants,
winding fine strands of wool upon her spindle.
Then kissing her as a fond mother would,
he says, "A secret matter, servants, leave!
Respect a mother's right to privacy."

Once witnesses are gone, the god emerges:
"I am that one who measures the long year,
who sees all things, and by whom all may see;
I am the world's eye and believe me, you
are something really special, quite a sight!"

Thanks mucho, Patricia,

Bob

Originally posted by Terese Coe:

"Heavenly thread!"

That's what Cole Porter used to sew gossamer wings.

Just one of those things,

Bob