In order to make a star with five branches
Where six would have been the same
A circle must first be drawn
In order to make a star with five branches …
A ring!
One did not take so many precautions
In order to make a tree from many branches
Trees that hide the stars
Trees!
You, full of nests and song birds
Covered with branches and leaves
That you lift as far as the stars!
– Robert Desnos
(Tree Silhouette Against Starry Night Sky — Image by © Robert Llewellyn/Corbis)
Sonnet #14
Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well,
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert;
Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.
William Shakepeare
(For the image at the top, click here.)
Blackbird
Its eye a dark pool
in which Sirius glitters
and never goes out.
Its melody husky
as though with suppressed tears.
Its bill is the gold
one quarries for amid
evening shadows. Do not despair
at the stars’ distance. Listening
to blackbird music is
to bridge in a moment
chasms of space-time, is to know
that beyond the silence
which terrified Pascal
there is a presence whose language
is not our language, but who has chosen
with peculiar clarity the feathered
creatures to convey the austerity
of his thought in song.
R. S. Thomas
(from The Poem and the Journey: 60 Poems for the Journey of Life, ed. Ruth Padel, image Sirius B by Apoxile on deviantart.com)
The image at the top is Sirius B by Apoxile on deviantart.com.
One assignment in the Blogging 201 course was to set up a regular, recurring feature. The content and form was left up to us. I was a bit baffled at first – especially since someone on the mythology reddit has already grabbed Monster Mondays. (Check it out!)
I have deliberately skipped several assignments in this course, because they didn’t apply to what I want to do with this blog. This one seemed to fit, however. I briefly considered a seven days, seven planets thing, and I might well do it yet, when I have more time. For now however, it’s poetry on Mondays.
Very early in the life of this blog, I was out stargazing and saw the huge shape of Orion overhead, and that reminded me of the Adrienne Rich poem, which I have always loved. My first pass at a menu included a page I called The Stars My Inspiration, which was essentially this poem and an image that suited it.
Since then I have included some other poems that resonated with the theme of this blog. Poetry Mondays will be the formal version of this. In the beginning, I merely searched Poem Hunter for anything with the word “star”. I also included a few old favourites.
Now, I need to find my Norton Anthology…
(The image at the top is Take Cover by Jamal, on deviantart.)
I saw a star slide down the sky,
Blinding the north as it went by,
Too burning and too quick to hold,
Too lovely to be bought or sold,
Good only to make wishes on
And then forever to be gone.
For the image at the top, click here.
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 hugged 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 reached 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, Lucifer in Starlight)
If you like the image at the top, click here.
Earth the most great and Heaven on high!
Father is he to man and god
And she, who taketh to her sod,
The cloud-flung rivers of the Sky.
And beareth offspring, men and grass,
and beasts in all their kinds, indeed,
Mother of All. And every seed
Earth-gendered back to Earth shall pass,
And back to Heaven the seeds of sky:
Seeing all things into all may range
And sundering, show new shapes of change,
But never that which is shall die.
(Euripides, fragment, trans. Gilbert Murray)
PS – I thought this was a totally obscure quote, which Timothy Findley uses as an epigraph in The Wars. But someone else likes it enough to name their blog for it.
If you like the image at the top, click here.
… and sat among the people
Teaching them what was worthy, and they listened
In silence, wondering at the revelations
How the great world began, the primal cause,
The nature of things, what God is, whence the snows
Come down, where lightning breaks from, whether wind
Or Jove speaks in the thunder from the clouds,
The cause of earthquakes, by what law the stars
Wheel in their courses, all the secrets hidden
From man’s imperfect knowledge.
(From “The Teachings of Pythagoras”, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book XV, trans. Rolfe Humphries)
You know, my mind went completely blank when confronted with this assignment. I chewed on it and chewed, and then I thought of this poem. I like to put a poem on the blog every so often, and this one says it all:
I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant
in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,
then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river
only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.
(Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Ceist Na Teangan/The Language Issue, trans. Paul Muldoon)
For the image of the Milky Way, click here.
He is wise in heart and mighty in strength
—who has hardened himself against him, and succeeded?—
5 he who removes mountains, and they know it not,
when he overturns them in his anger,
6 who shakes the earth out of its place,
and its pillars tremble;
7 who commands the sun, and it does not rise;
who seals up the stars;
8 who alone stretched out the heavens
and trampled the waves of the sea;
9 who made the Bear and Orion,
the Pleiades and the chambers of the south;
10 who does great things beyond searching out,
and marvelous things beyond number.
11 Behold, he passes by me, and I see him not;
he moves on, but I do not perceive him.
12 Behold, he snatches away; who can turn him back?
Who will say to him, ‘What are you doing?’
(Job 9: 4-12, from The Bible Gateway)
The image at the top comes from here.
We Are Star Stuff 