More Bright Stars

There are some subjects in literature which seem inexhaustible: birth, childhood, first love, marriage, adultery, revenge – and death. What makes these topics of such enduring fascination is their universality, since all of us have experienced at least the first of them, although – if one concurs with Wittgenstein – none of us will experience the last. Sharing, as we do, this little planet, it seems unsurprising that so many of us should have concerned ourselves with that most universal of all subjects – the solar system and our place in it. Since we are only human, it’s also not very surprising that the literature we’ve produced is often as much about what Donne would have called ‘sublunary’ matters – love, betrayal, disappointment, loss – as it is about the stars themselves. Which of course is what makes it so moving, and so readable…

Following on from Keats and his ‘Bright Star’ moment – surely one of the most ecstatic expressions of love in the English language? – I’ve put together a brief compilation of some extracts from poems – and a few novels – dealing with the stars. Again, these are just a small selection out of many, and have been chosen because of their particular resonance for me. I make no apologies for the fact that their range – both historically and culturally – is relatively narrow. This isn’t a compendium, but a ‘commonplace book’. Writings which, when first read (or heard) crystallized the universe in a few perfect, heart-stopping lines.

The recent television dramatization of the late Michael Faber’s novel ‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ will have brought Tennyson’s strange and beguiling poem, ‘The Princess’ to mind for those who admire – as I do – the extraordinary musicality of his verse. Tennyson is such a quotable poet – and there’s a reason for that. He wrote lines that ‘sing’ as much as they signify (although what they signify is often surprising: ‘The Princess’, published in 1847, put the case for higher education for women over twenty years before the founding of Girton College.)

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white ;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk ;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font :
The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me…

Another ‘High Victorian’ poet whose verse, once read, remains indelibly in the mind, is Robert Browning. Those who encountered My Last Duchess or Porphyria’s Lover at a formative age, will know what I mean. Here’s the great man in more playful mood:

All that I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(like an angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue ;
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue !
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled :
They must solace themselves with Saturn above it,
What matter to me if their star is a world ?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

Like his near-contemporary, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith is as well – if not better – known, for his novels as for his verse. And yet, as with Hardy, the poetry is well worth reading. Some people prefer it to the novels, in fact. Personally, I prefer not to have to choose.

This is from ‘Winter Heaven’:

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…

Speaking of Hardy, brings me to perhaps the most ‘astronomical’ novel in the canon: Two on a Tower, published in 1882. Telling the story of – what else? – a pair of ‘star-cross’d lovers’, its setting is an ancient tower, converted into an observatory by the young astronomer, Swithin St Cleeve. It is the exotically-named Swithin’s passion for the beautiful Viviette Constantine – married and ten years his senior – which concerns much of the action, but there is also a good deal about astronomy, such as the following conversation, on Lady Constantine’s first visit to the tower:

’You said you would show me the heavens, if I could come on a starlight night. I have come.’
Swithin, as a preliminary, swept round the telescope to Jupiter, and exhibited to her the glory of that orb. Then he directed the instrument to the less bright shape of Saturn.
‘Here,’ he said, warming up to the subject, ‘we see a world which is to my mind by far the most wonderful in the solar system. Think of streams of satellites or meteors racing round and round the planet like a fly-wheel, so close together as to seem solid matter!’ He entered further and further into the subject, his ideas gathering momentum as he went on, like his pet heavenly bodies.
When he paused for breath, she said, in tones very different from his own, ‘I ought now to tell you that, though I am interested in the stars they were not what I came to see you about. They were only an excuse for coming…’

A more famous quote from a – deservedly – more famous novel is the following exchange, between the eponymous heroine and her young brother, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, whose bleak fatalism still has the power to chill:

’Did you say that the stars were worlds, Tess?’
‘Yes.’
‘All like ours?’
‘I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound – a few blighted.’
‘Which do we live on – a splendid one or a blighted one?
‘A blighted one.’

It is a relief to turn from such a view – which certainly seems to have been that of the author’s, to judge from the prevailing darkness of much of his writing – to the joyfully exclamatory outpourings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This, though written a generation before Tess, was not published until 1918, twenty years after Hopkins’s death.

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies !
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air !
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there !
Down in dim woods the diamond delves ! the elves’-eyes !
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies !

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare !
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare ! —
Ah well ! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then ! bid then ! — What ? — Prayer, patience, aims, vows.
Look, look : a May-mess, like on orchard boughs !

Look ! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows !
These are indeed the barn ; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

A poet born around the time that the young G M Hopkins was beginning his poetic experiments was W B Yeats – and the two share something of the same highly-charged, mystical approach to the beauty of Nature – although in Hopkins’s case the mysticism was overtly religious. Yeats’s poetry is full of astronomical references – from the nursery-rhyme-like echoes of the closing lines of The Song of Wandering Aengus

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon
The golden apples of the sun

to the esoteric knowledge hinted at in The Phases of the Moon;

Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon,
The full and the moon’s dark and all the crescents,
Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty
The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in…

But it’s the elegant playfulness of the following that sticks in the mind: a poem that – although not as intricate in structure or as complex in theme as some of Yeats’s more famous works – beautifully envisages its astronomical/feline subject:

The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.

Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.

Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance ?
When two close kindred meet.

What better than call a dance ?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.

Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range ?

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

Although published in 1919, during the aftermath of the First World War, this poem conveys nothing of the horrors of that time; nor, if one considers the poetry which came out of the war, is there very much at all about the stars – although a tantalizing fragment by Wilfred Owen survives, entitled But I Was Looking At The Permanent Stars, in which the poet seems to be about to draw a contrast between the ‘permanence’ of the stars and the all-too impermanent nature of life on the Western Front. Nor is there much (Yeats’s charming poem aside) in the literature of the post-war years which tells us that people were particularly concerned with such matters – apart from a lovely description (too long to quote here) of a young woman looking at the night sky in Virginia Woolf’s appositely titled Night and Day.

It isn’t until a few years later, it seems, that poets really started to make the starry heavens theirs again – and then, as in this extract from a much longer work by A E Housman, the stars were often just a starting-point for a meditation on more worldly things, from a failed love affair to the worsening international crisis:

The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases,
And I lie down alone.

The rainy Pleiads wester
And seek beyond the sea
The head that I shall dream of,
And ’twill not dream of me.

Here is Robert Frost, in philosophical mood, in a poem (wonderfully) entitled On Looking Up By Chance At The Constellations:

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.

Writing around the same time, as war in Europe again seemed imminent, was W H Auden, in A Walk After Dark. I’ve quoted both these poems in full because they seem to demand it, although of course few poems lend themselves to being ‘filetted’:

A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring :
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shameless a stare ;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead

Now, unready to die
Bur already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.

It’s cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People’s Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid ;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.

Occuring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world :

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

Even leaving out, as I have, quite a number of poems I wanted to include – Louis MacNiece’s Star-gazer being one – has meant I’ve still only reached the Second World War, in this, the second part of my chronological survey. Because I do want to finish with this extract from T S Eliot’s Four Quartets, published a year before the war ended. There’s something about the metaphysical nature of the imagery which recalls seventeenth century poets like Donne and Milton, whose writing about the stars and planets still seems so resonant today. I first read this when I was nineteen, and it sent a shiver up my spine. It still does.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.