#WingedWordsWindsday: 2023/01/04 -- Welcome to the Winter Stars!

 

WINGED WORDS WINDSDAY

Compiled by Rob Chappell (@RHCLambengolmo)

Vol. 2, No. 10: January 4, 2023

 

 

Welcome to the Winter Stars!

 

Introductory Poems

                The bright stars of winter are now in full view, from early evening until the wee small hours of the morning. Here are some poems about the Pleiades star cluster and the constellation Orion, along with some introductory verses that celebrate the shining denizens of the night sky.

 

From the Orphic Hymns

                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.

 

Orphic Hymn #6: “To the Stars”

With holy voice I call the stars on high,

Pure sacred lights and genii of the sky.

Celestial stars, the progeny of Night,

In whirling circles beaming far your light,

Refulgent rays around the heavens ye throw,

Eternal fires, the source of all below.

With flames significant of Fate ye shine,

And aptly rule for men a path divine.

In seven bright zones ye run with wandering flames,

And heaven and earth compose your lucid frames:

With course unwearied, pure and fiery bright

Forever shining through the veil of Night.

Hail twinkling, joyful, ever wakeful fires!

Propitious shine on all my just desires;

These sacred rites regard with conscious rays,

And end our works devoted to your praise.

 

 

“Escape at Bedtime”

By Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

Excerpted from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885)

 

The lights from the parlor and kitchen shone out

Through the blinds and the windows and bars;

And high overhead and all moving about,

There were thousands of millions of stars.

There ne’er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,

Nor of people in church or the Park,

As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,

And that glittered and winked in the dark.

 

The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,

And the star of the sailor, and Mars,

These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall

Would be half full of water and stars.

They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,

And they soon had me packed into bed;

But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,

And the stars going round in my head.

 

“Stars” by Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall (1883-1922)

 Now in the West the slender Moon lies low,

And now Orion glimmers through the trees,

Clearing the Earth with even pace and slow,

And now the stately-moving Pleiades,

In that soft infinite darkness overhead

Hang jewel-wise upon a silver thread.

And all the lonelier stars that have their place,

Calm lamps within the distant southern sky,

And planet-dust upon the edge of space,

Look down upon the fretful world, and I

Look up to outer vastness unafraid

And see the stars which sang when Earth was made.

 

 

Poems about the Pleiades Star Cluster (M45)

 

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.

 

From the Phenomena (Lines 253-267)

By Aratus (ca. 315-240 BCE)

Near [Taurus’] left thigh move the Pleiades, all in a cluster, but small is the space that holds them and singly they dimly shine. Seven are they in the songs of men, albeit only six are visible to the eyes. Yet not a star, I ween, has perished from the sky unmarked since the earliest memory of man, but even so the tale is told. Those seven are called by name Alcyone, Merope, Celaeno, Electra, Asterope, Taygeta, and queenly Maia. Small and dim are they all alike, but widely famed they wheel in heaven at morn and eventide, by the will of Zeus, who bade them tell of the beginning of Summer and Winter and of the coming of the ploughing-time.

 

From “Locksley Hall” (Lines 7-16)

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 fireflies tangled in a silver braid.

Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime

With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;

When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:

When I dipped into the future far as human eye could see;

Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.

 

The Pleiades are a compact yet prominent cluster of stars visible on autumn and winter evenings. (Photo Credit: NASA – Public Domain)

 

Poems about the Constellation Orion

                Editor’s Note: We open this section with an excerpt about Nimrod, a biblical warrior-hero whose career as a mighty hunter and city-builder is recounted in Genesis 10:8-10. Exegetes from the Abrahamic faith traditions have sometimes identified the constellation Orion as a representation of Nimrod on the celestial sphere.

                Next up is an excerpt from the prologue to the first English version of the Gilgamesh Epic. Many Assyriologists and mythographers have proposed that Gilgamesh, the world’s first superhero, was the prototype for the constellation Orion and was also perhaps the same person as Nimrod, mentioned above.

 

From The Four Monarchies, Part I: The Assyrian

By Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

[Slightly Modernized by the Editor]

When time was young, and world in infancy,

Man did not proudly strive for sovereignty:

But each one thought his petty rule was high,

If of his house he held the monarchy.

This was the Golden Age, but after came

The boisterous son of Cush, grandchild to Ham,

That mighty hunter, who in his strong toils

Both beasts and men subjected to his spoils:

The strong foundation of proud Babel laid,

Uruk, Akkad, and Kalneh also made.

 

From the “Invocation” to Ishtar and Izdubar: The Epic of Babylon

By Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton (1884)

[Slightly Modernized by the Editor]

Oh, come, dear naiads, tune your lyres and lutes,

And sing of love with chastest, sweetest notes,

Of Akkad’s goddess Ishtar, Queen of Love,

And Gilgamesh, with softest measure move;

Great Shamash’s son, of him, dear naiads, sing!

Of him whom goddess Ishtar warmly wooed,

Of him whose breast with virtue was imbued.

He as a giant towered, lofty grown,

As Babel’s great potentate was he known,

His armèd fleet commanded on the seas

And erstwhile travelled on the foreign leas;

His mother, queenly Ninsun, on the throne

From Uruk all Sumeria ruled alone.

 

“The Winter Scene: Part II” by Bliss Carman (1861-1929)

Out from the silent portal of the hours,

When frosts are come and all the hosts put on.

Their burnished gear to march across the night

And o'er a darkened Earth in splendor shine,

Slowly above the world Orion wheels

His glittering square, while on the shadowy hill

And throbbing like a sea-light through the dusk,

Great Sirius rises in his flashing blue.

Lord of the winter night, august and pure,

Returning year on year untouched by time,

To hearten faith with thine unfaltering fire,

There are no hurts that beauty cannot ease,

No ills that love cannot at last repair,

In the victorious progress of the soul.

 

“Winter Stars” (1920)

By Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

I went out at night alone;

The young blood flowing beyond the sea

Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings —

I bore my sorrow heavily.

But when I lifted up my head

From shadows shaken on the snow,

I saw Orion in the east

Burn steadily as long ago.

From windows in my father’s house,

Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,

I watched Orion as a girl

Above another city’s lights.

Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,

The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,

All things are changed, save in the east

The faithful beauty of the stars.

 

Artistic rendering of the Orion Service Module of the Artemis spacecraft, designed by NASA and the European Space Agency, which will return humans to the Moon in the next few years. It’s named after the constellation Orion, which dominates the evening skies of wintertime. (Image Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)