Sky, Stars and Universe

The great brand Made lightnings in the splendor of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the northern sea, So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur.

 

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars invisible by day.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily?

There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view.

The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us—visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.

The moving moon went up the sky, And nowhere did abide; Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

The hornèd Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip.

To see a world in a grain of sand

And ther he saugh, with ful avysement

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces [the heavens] terrifies me.

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;

The illuminable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, for we have no word to speak about it.

The great world’s altar-stairs, That slope through darkness up to God.

 

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,

 

When the stars threw down their spears

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky!

 

For I dipp’d 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 rain’d a ghastly dew From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.

 

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

 

Complete people gaze into the blue sky above, plunge into the center of the earth below, and run freely in the eight directions without even a change of mood.

Of the original phenomena, light is the most enthralling.