Juno & the 4th of July

Dear Family, Friends, and Colleagues:

As the U.S.A. celebrates its 240^th birthday on Monday, July 4^th, astronomers and space enthusiasts all over the world will be celebrating the 40^th anniversary of the Viking I probe’s landing on Mars (7/4/1976) AND the arrival of NASA’s Juno probe at Jupiter. Juno, named after the wife of Jupiter in Roman mythology, will examine the giant planet’s atmosphere and inner structure, as well as take photos of Jupiter and its manifold moons. The four largest moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto) were discovered by Galileo in 1609 using his famous telescope. All of them, except for Io, probably harbor subsurface oceans of liquid water, which would be prime hunting grounds for life beyond our world. J

To celebrate Juno’s arrival at Jupiter, and planetary exploration in general, here are a couple of poems featuring the planet Jupiter, along with two ancient snippets of verse about Juno (a/k/a Hera in Greek mythology).

“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.”

Editor’s Note:

          The annual cycle of the seasons and its effects on our natural surroundings are recurring themes throughout world literature. The Orphic poets – a guild of ancient Greek philosopher-bards named after their legendary founder, Orpheus – celebrated the changing of the seasons, the wonders of the natural world, and their lofty ideals in poetic chants, several dozen of which were preserved in written form after centuries of oral transmission. In the poetic forms of their prescientific age (ca. 1000-500 BCE), the Orphic poets chose to personify the forces of Nature, the celestial orbs, and abstract ideals in order to explain how and why the natural world and the human social order function in the ways that they do.

          The Homeric school of poetry, founded perhaps by Homer himself (fl. ca. 8th century BCE), and carried forward by his disciples and successors for many generations, also produced poems that celebrated heroic deeds and the mysterious forces of Nature, many of which were personified as divine or semidivine beings. In both of the following poems, we can learn how the ancient Greek philosopher-bards perceived Hera/Juno, not as a jealous, vindictive person (as in literal interpretations of Greek mythology), but as a benevolent, life-giving aspect of Nature that contributed to the well-being of all life on Earth.

Orphic Hymn #15: “To Juno”

O Royal Juno of majestic mien,

Aerial-formed, divine, Jove’s blessed queen,

Throned in the bosom of caerulean air,

The race of mortals is thy constant care.

The cooling gales thy power alone inspires,

Which nourish life, which every life desires.

Mother of clouds and winds, from thee alone

Producing all things, mortal life is known:

All natures share thy temperament divine,

And universal sway alone is thine.

With sounding blasts of wind, the swelling sea

And rolling rivers roar, when shook by thee.

Come, blessed, divine, famed, almighty queen,

With aspect kind, rejoicing and serene.

Homeric Hymn #12: “To Hera” (a/k/a Juno)

I sing of golden-throned Hera whom Rhea bore. Queen of the immortals is she, surpassing all in beauty: she is the sister and the wife of loud-thundering Zeus, —the glorious one whom all the blessed throughout high Olympus reverence and honor even as Zeus who delights in thunder.

Happy 4^th of July weekend! J

Rob