#WingedWordsWindsday: 2023/10/18 -- The Pleiades

 

WINGED WORDS WINDSDAY

Compiled & Edited by Rob Chappell (@RHCLambengolmo)

Vol. 2, No. 51: October 18, 2023

 

The Pleiades: The Celestial Seven Sisters

 

A Note from the Editor

                Longtime readers of this blog are aware of my lifelong interest in astronomy. As the nights grow longer and cooler, we are able to see the stars come out a few minutes earlier each evening! J Here’s a selection of my favorite poems about the Pleiades star cluster (a/k/a M45, the Seven Sisters), which is visible on October nights from about 7:30 PM onward. This delightful star cluster is located about 400 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Taurus (the Bull), which is one of the thirteen “signs of the Zodiac.”

 

The Pleiades (Photo Credit: NASA – Public Domain)

 

“The Pleiades” (Excerpts)

From Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning (1899)

By R. H. Allan (1838-1908)

                The Pleiades, the Narrow Cloudy Train of Female Stars of Manilius, and the Starry Seven, Old Atlas' Children, of Keats' Endymion, have everywhere been among the most noted objects in the history, poetry, and mythology of the heavens; though, as Aratus wrote, “not a mighty space holds all, and they themselves are dim to see.”

                All literature contains frequent allusions to them, and in late years they probably have been more attentively and scientifically studied than any other group.

                The Pleiades seem to be among the first stars mentioned in astronomical literature, appearing in Chinese annals of 2357 BC., Alcyone, the lucida, then being near the vernal equinox, although now 24° north of the celestial equator; and in the Hindu lunar zodiac as the 1st nakshatra, Krittika,​ Karteek, or Kartiguey, the General of the Celestial Armies, probably long before 1730 BC, when precession carried the equinoctial point into Aries. Al-Biruni, referring to this early position of the equinox in the Pleiades, which he found noticed "in some books of Hermes,"​ wrote: “This statement must have been made about 3000 years and more before Alexander.”

                And their beginning the astronomical year gave rise to the title "the Great Year of the Pleiades" for the cycle of precession of about 25,900 years.

                In the 5th century before Christ Euripides mentioned them with Aetos, our Altair, as nocturnal timekeepers; and Sappho, a century previously, marked the middle of the night by their setting. Centuries still earlier Hesiod and Homer brought them into their most beauti­ful verse; the former calling them [Op. et D. 383] Atlagenes, Atlas-born. The patriarch Job is thought to refer to them twice in his word Kīmāh, a Cluster, or Heap, which the Hebrew herdsman-prophet Amos, probably contemporary with Hesiod, also used; the prophet's term being translated "the seven stars" in our Authorized Version, but "Pleiades" in the Revised. The similar Babylonian-Assyrian Kimtu, or Kimmatu, signifies a "Family Group," for which the Syrians had Kīmā, quoted in Humboldt's Cosmos as Gemat; this most natural simile is repeated in Seneca's Medea as densos Pleiadum greges. Manilius had Glomerabile Sidus, the Rounded Asterism, equivalent to the  Globus Pleiadum of Valerius Flaccus; while Brown translates the Pleiades of Aratus as the Flock of Clusterers.

 

 

“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.

 

“The Pleiades”

By Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

 

By day you cannot see the sky

For it is up so very high.

You look and look, but it's so blue

That you can never see right through.

 

But when night comes it is quite plain,

And all the stars are there again.

They seem just like old friends to me,

I've known them all my life you see.

 

There is the dipper first, and there

Is Cassiopeia in her chair,

Orion's belt, the Milky Way,

And lots I know but cannot say.

 

One group looks like a swarm of bees,

Papa says they're the Pleiades;

But I think they must be the toy

Of some nice little angel boy.

 

Perhaps his jackstones which to-day

He has forgot to put away,

And left them lying on the sky

Where he will find them by and by.

 

I wish he'd come and play with me.

We'd have such fun, for it would be

A most unusual thing for boys

To feel that they had stars for toys!

 

 

“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 “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.

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. —

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew

From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly Earth shall slumber, lapped in universal law.

 

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 Works and Days (Lines 383 ff.)

By Hesiod (fl. 8^th 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.

 

The Nebra Sky Disc (pictured above) was unearthed in Germany in 1999. Dating from 1600 BCE, the Pleiades cluster of seven stars appears prominently between the depictions of the Sun and Moon. (Image Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)