Sky, Stars and Universe

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

Under the wide and starry sky

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,

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

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.

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.

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes—I mean the universe … This book is written in mathematical language and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help … one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

And ther he saugh, with ful avysement

When the stars threw down their spears

This life’s dim windows of the soul

If the Sun and Moon should doubt,

To see a world in a grain of sand

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

Out on the lawn I lie in bed,

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.

The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky,— No higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land Farther away on either hand; The soul can split the sky in two, And let the face of God shine through. But East and West will pinch the heart That can not keep them pushed apart; And he whose soul is flat—the sky Will cave in on him by and by.

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

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

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