Sky, Stars and Universe

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning.

 

To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night—brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

 

All the elements will be seen mixed together in a great whirling mass, now borne towards the centre of the world, now towards the sky; and now furiously rushing from the South towards the frozen North, and sometimes from the East towards the West, and then again from this hemisphere to the other.

O Milky Way, sister in whiteness To Canaan’s rivers and the bright Bodies of lovers drowned, Can we follow toilsomely Your path to other nebulae? 6

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

There I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over... Faint to my ears came the gathered rumor of all lands: the springing and the dying, the song and the weeping, and the slow everlasting groan of overburdened stone. J. R. R.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars—billions upon billions of stars.

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face

I have ... a terrible need ... shall I say the word? ... of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.

We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and bandied

Morn, Wak’d by the circling hours, with rosy hand Unbarr’d the gates of light.

From the petal’s edge a line starts that being of steel infinitely fine, infinitely rigid penetrates the Milky Way without contact—

I have seen starry archipelagoes! and islands Whose raving skies are opened to the voyager: Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep, in exile, A million golden birds, O future Vigor? 9

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart; Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life’s common way, In cheerful godliness.

Patio, heaven’s watercourse. The patio is the slope down which the sky flows into the house. Serenely eternity waits at the crossway of the stars.

Give me my Romeo: and, when he shall die,

 

O dark dark dark. 7 They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar, “O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are.”

While the stars that oversprinkle

The Universal Harmony records various wonders, and it says: "When the P'eng journeys to the southern darkness, the waters are roiled for three thousand li. He beats the whirlwind and rises ninety thousand li, setting off on the sixth month gale." Wavering heat, bits of dust, living things blowing each other about – the sky looks very blue. Is that its real color, or is it because it is so far away and has no end? When the bird looks down, all he sees is blue too.

This life’s dim windows of the soul

Viewed from the distance of the moon, theastonishing thing about the earth . . . is that it is alive. . . . Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is therising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. . . . It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full ofinformation, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.