Hello everyone –
Sunday, November 8th marks the 25th birthday (Silver Jubilee) of the Quotemail emailing list AND the 25h birthday of my younger cousin, A.N.A. In honor of these two birthdays, and the longstanding interest in astronomy that I share with many of our listmembers, here’s a selection of my favorite poems about the Pleiades star cluster (a/k/a M45, the Seven Sisters, etc.), which is visible all night long during the month of November. We begin with an invocation to Urania, the Greek Muse of Astronomy, and we conclude with an epigram by the greatest Greek philosopher of all time, Plato, in honor of his birthday on November 7th. 😊
From Paradise Lost: Book 7, Lines 1-20
By John Milton (1608-1674)
Descend from Heaven, Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine
Following, above the Olympian hill I soar,
Above the flight of Pegasean wing!
The meaning, not the name, I call: for thou
Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top
Of old Olympus dwellest; but, heavenly-born,
Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,
Thou with eternal Wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play
In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased
With thy celestial song. Up led by thee
Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed,
An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air,
Thy tempering: with like safety guided down
Return me to my native element:
Lest from this flying steed unreined, (as once
Bellerophon, though from a lower clime,)
Dismounted, on the Aleian field I fall,
Erroneous there to wander, and forlorn.
“On the Beach at Night”
By Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.
From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.
Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.
Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?
Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.
From The Works and Days (Lines 383 ff.)
By Hesiod (fl. 8th century BCE)
“When the Pleiades, Atlas’ daughters, start to rise, begin your harvest; plough when they go down. For forty days and nights, they hide themselves, and as the year rolls round, appear again when you begin to sharpen sickle-blades; this law holds on the plains and by the sea, and in the mountain valleys, fertile lands far from the swelling sea.”
Poem #48 by Sappho (ca. 630-570 BCE)
The sinking Moon has left the sky,
The Pleiades have also gone.
Midnight comes – and goes, the hours fly
And solitary still, I lie.
The Pleiades (Photo Credit: NASA – Public Domain)
An Epigram Attributed to Plato (427-347 BCE)
16. Some say there are nine Muses. How thoughtless! Look at Sappho of Lesbos; she makes a tenth.
HAPPY 25TH BIRTHDAY TO QUOTEMAIL AND TO MY COUSIN, A.N.A.!
Cheers,
Rob
