Happy Birthdaze!

Dear Members, Alumni, & Friends of the JSMT:

Saturday, November 8^th marks the 19^th birthday of the Quotemail emailing list AND the 19^th birthday of our youngest listmember, my cousin Zenaida. The nineteenth birthday is highly significant for us all, because when we turn 19 (or 38 or 57 or 76 or 95 or 114), the phases of the Moon occur on exactly the same days of the calendar month as in the year we were born. This means that if you look outside your window on Saturday night, the Moon will be in exactly the same spot in the sky as on the day when Quotemail and Zenaida were both born. :) This 19-year calendrical phenomenon is known as the Metonic Cycle, which was discovered by the ancient Greek astronomer Meton of Athens (fl. ca. 432 BCE).

In honor of the Metonic Cycle, 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 night sky and its denizens. We begin with an invocation to Urania, the Greek Muse of Astronomy.

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.

“Wanderers”

By Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

Wide are the meadows of night,
And daisies are shining there,
Tossing their lovely dews,
Lustrous and fair;

And through these sweet fields go,
Wanderers amid the stars --
Venus, Mercury, Uranus, Neptune,
Saturn, Jupiter, Mars.

‘Tired in their silver, they move,
And circling, whisper and say,
“Fair are the blossoming meads of delight
Through which we stray.”

From “Locksley Hall”

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

HAPPY 19^TH BIRTHDAY TO QUOTEMAIL AND ZENAIDA, MY YOUNGEST COUSIN! :)

Rob