A Selection of 18th and 19th-century Poems
on Astronomical Themes
Modern and Contemporary Poetry
18th and 19th Century Poetry
The Jolly Company
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
The Stars, a jolly company,
I envied, straying late and lonely;
And cried upon their revelry:
“O white companionship! You only
In love, in faith unbroken dwell,
Friends radiant and inseparable!”
Light-heart and glad they seemed to me
And merry comrades (even so
God out of Heaven may laugh to see
The happy crowds; and never know
That in his lone obscure distress
Each walketh in a wilderness).
But I, remembering, pitied well
And loved them, who, with lonely light,
In empty infinite spaces dwell,
Disconsolate. For, all the night,
I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,
Star to faint star, across the sky.
At a Lunar Eclipse
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,
Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine
In even monochrome and curving line
Of imperturbable serenity.
How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry
With the torn troubled form I know as thine,
That profile, placid as a brow divine,
With continents of moil and misery?
And can immense Mortality but throw
So small a shade, and Heaven's high human scheme
Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?
Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show,
Nation at war with nation, brains that teem,
Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?
from Song of Myself
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
I do not know what is untried and afterward;
But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.
Each who passes is consider'd--each who stops is consider'd--
not a single one can it fail.
It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried,
Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side, [...]
Nor anything in the myriads of spheres--nor one of the myriads
of myriads that inhabit them.
Nor the present—nor the least wisp that is known. [...]
I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinked systems,
And all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher, edge but the rim
of the farther systems.
Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward, and forever outward.
My sun has his sun, and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.
There is no stoppage, and never can be stoppage;
If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run;
We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
And as surely go as much farther—and then farther and farther.
A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span, or make it impatient;
They are but parts—anything is but a part.
See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that;
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.
My rendezvous is appointed—it is certain;
The Lord will be there, and wait till I come, on perfect terms;
(The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine, will be there. [...]
This day before dawn I ascended a hill, and look’d at the crowded heaven,
And I said to my Spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then?
And my Spirit said, No, we but level that life, to pass and continue beyond. [...]
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and
composed before a million universes.
from Night on the Prairies (1860)
Walt Whitman
I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless
around me myriads of other globes.
Now, while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me, I will
measure myself by them;
And now, touch'd with the lives of other globes, arrived as far
along as those of the earth,
Or waiting to arrive, or pass'd on farther than those of the earth,
I henceforth no more ignore them, than I ignore my own life,
Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts, the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the learned 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 wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
I am like a slip of comet
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
—I am like a slip of comet,
scarce worth discovery, in some corner seen
Bridging the slender difference of two stars,
Come out of space, or suddenly engender'd
By heady elements, for no man knows
: But when she sights the sun she grows and sizes
And spins her skirts out, while her central star
Shakes its cocoonning mists; and so she comes
To fields of light; millions of travelling rays
Pierce her; she hangs upon the flame-cased sun
And sucks the light as full as Gideon's fleece
: But then her tether calls her, she falls off,
And as she dwindles shreds her flock of gold
Admidst the sistering planets' till she comes
To single Saturn, last and solitary;
And then goes out into the cavernous dark.
So I go out: my little sweet is done
I have drawn heat from this contagious sun:
To not ungentle death now forth I run.
from Charles Sumner
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
Were a star quenched on high,
For ages would its light,
Still travelling downward from the sky,
Shine on our mortal sight.
So when a great man dies,
For years beyond our ken,
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men.
from Queen Mab
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
[The description is of an imaginary tour conducted by a spirit…]
Earth’s distant orb appeared
The smallest light that twinkles in the heaven;
Whilst round the chariot’s way
Innumerable systems rolled
And countless spheres diffused
An ever-varying glory.
It was a sight of wonder: some
Were hornèd like the crescent moon;
Some shed a mild and silver beam
Like Hesperus o'er the western sea;
Some dashed athwart with trains of flame,
Like worlds to death and ruin driven;
Some shone like suns, and as the chariot passed,
Eclipsed all other light.
Spirit of Nature! here -
In this interminable wilderness
Of worlds, at whose immensity
Even soaring fancy staggers,
Here is thy fitting temple! […]
Below lay stretched the universe!
There, far as the remotest line
That bounds imagination's flight,
Countless and unending orbs
In mazy motion intermingled,
Yet still fulfilled immutably
Eternal Nature's law.
Above, below, around,
The circling systems formed
A wilderness of harmony;
Each with undeviating aim,
In eloquent silence, through the depths of space
Pursued its wondrous way. […]
Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light,
Of which yon earth is one, is wide diffused
A Spirit of activity and life,
That knows no term, cessation, or decay.