Category Archives: Poetry

Beautiful Star of Bethlehem

Beautiful Star of Bethlehem
Shining afar through shadows dim
Giving the light to those who long have gone
Guiding the Wise Men on their way
Unto the place where Jesus lay
Beautiful Star of Bethlehem, shine on

Oh Beautiful Star (Beautiful, Beautiful Star)
Of Bethlehem (Star of Bethlehem)
Shine upon us until the glory dawns
Give us the light to light the way
Unto the land of perfect day
Beautiful Star of Bethlehem, shine on

Beautiful Star the hope of light
Guiding the pilgrims through the night
Over the mountains ’til the break of dawn
Into the light of perfect day
It will give out a lovely ray
Beautiful Star of Bethlehem, shine on

Beautiful Star the hope of rest
For the redeemed, the good and the blessed
Yonder in glory when the crown is won
Jesus is now that star divine
Brighter and brighter He will shine
Beautiful Star of Bethlehem, shine on

(Composed by R. Fischer Boyce. You can also listen to it it here.)

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Winter Heavens

Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive
Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.
It is a night to make the heavens our home
More than the nest whereto apace we strive.
Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive,
In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.
They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam:
The living throb in me, the dead revive.
Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath,
Life glistens on the river of the death.
It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt,
Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs
Of radiance, the radiance enrings:
And this is the soul’s haven to have felt.

–George Meredith

PS – Also check out this article and this site for more on Meredith.

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Bright star – 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,
Pillow’d 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 to death.

– John Keats

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The Moon’s my constant mistress

When I short have shorn my sow’s face
And swigged my horny barrel,
In an oaken inn I pound my skin
As a suit of gilt apparel;
The moon’s my constant mistress,
And the lowly owl my marrow;
The flaming drake and the night crow make
Me music to my sorrow.
While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.

(excerpt from Tom O’Bedlam’s song)

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Elevation

Au-dessus des étangs, au-dessus des vallées
Des montagnes, du bois, des nuages, des mers,
Par delà le soleil, par delà les éthers,
Par delà les confins des sphères etoilées.

Above the valleys and the lakes, beyond
The woods, seas, clouds and mountain-ranges, far
Above the sun, the aethers silver-swanned
With nebulae and the remotest star.

–Baudelaire, trans. Roy Campbell.

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The Moon and Stars – Sappho

The stars that round the Queen of Night

Like maids attend her
Hide as in veils of mist their light
When she, in full-orbed glory bright.
O’er all the earth shines from her height,

A silver splendour.

– Sappho, trans. Arthur S. Way

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The Lake of Memory

Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a spring,
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.
To this spring approach not near.
But thou shalt find another, from the Lake of Memory
Cold water flowing forth, and there are guardians before it.
Say, ‘I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven;
But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves.
But I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.’
And of themselves they will give thee to drink of the holy spring-
And thereafter among the other heroes thou shalt have lordship.

[Plate from Petelia, South Italy, fourth-third century B.C.]

Constellations

After bedtime the child climbed on her dresser
and peeled phosphorescent stars off the sloped
gable-wall, dimming the night vault of her ceiling
like a haze or the interfering glow
of a great city, small hands anticipating
eons as they raided the playful patterns
her father had mapped for her—black holes now
where the raised thumb-stubs and ears of the Bat
had been, the feet of the Turtle, wakeful
eyes of the Mourning Dove. She stuck those paper
stars on herself. One on each foot, the backs
of her hands, navel, tip of nose and so on,
then turned on the lamp by her bed and stood close
like a child chilled after a winter bath
pressed up to an air duct or a radiator
until those paper stars absorbed more light
than they could hold. Then turned off the lamp,
walked out into the dark hallway and called.

Her father came up. He heard her breathing
as he clomped upstairs preoccupied, wrenched
out of a rented film just now taking grip
on him and the child’s mother, his day-end
bottle of beer set carefully on the stairs,
marking the trail back down into that evening
adult world—he could hear her breathing (or
really, more an anxious, breathy giggle) but
couldn’t see her, then in the hallway stopped,
mind spinning to sort the apparition
of fireflies hovering ahead, till he sensed
his daughter and heard in her breathing
the pent, grave concentration of her pose,
mapped onto the star-chart of the darkness,
arms stretched high, head back, one foot slightly raised—
the Dancer, he supposed, and all his love
spun to centre with crushing force, to find her
momentarily fixed, as unchanging
as he and her mother must seem to her,
and the way the stars are; as if the stars are.