Galactic Poetry Sunday

Having taken some notes on ‘alien‘, let me make some on ‘galaxy’, which has had a longer shelf-life than you might think in English poetry.

Se yonder loo the Galoxie
Whiche men clepeth the melky weye
For hit ys white.

That’s Chaucer. It sounds incongruously scientific, doesn’t it? That’s us projecting our scientific sense back into a Greek name for that whitish light-y bit up there.

Our concept of galaxy needs telescopes. Galileo is first to see the Milky Way is made up of stars (1610) – although Democritus guessed it long ago. In 1750 Thomas Wright first theorizes the gravitational structure of the galaxy (and Kant thinks he was right.) The astronomer Herschel is first to star-map the shape of the Milky Way (1785).

You might think poetry and SF don’t go together especially. As Coleridge says: “There can be no galaxy in poetry.” (But he just meant you shouldn’t cram too many bright things close together – too many figures and metaphors and such. Don’t get fancy, eh!)

But galactic poetry, even in our post-Galilean sense, comes early.

A star thought by the erring passenger,
Which falling from its native orb dropped here,
And makes the earth (its centre) now its sphere.

Should many of these sparks together be,
He that the unknown light far off should see
Would think it a terrestrial galaxy.

That’s “The Glow-Worm”, by Thomas Stanley. I presume it appears in his 1649 Poems. Late Metaphysical Poetry, then, but pretty quick off the mark, poetizing cutting edge observational science.

OK, I’ll give you the full poem under the fold. It’s kind of a cheat quoting these stanzas in isolation because ‘star thought’ shouts out pretty cosmic, starting us out like that. (I thought I was clever to note this, but the editor of this standard anthology did, too. So I’m not such a special snowflake, after all.) In context, what is happening is that a glow-worm looks like a fallen star to an erring passenger (on the earth?)

Here it is:

Stay, fairest Chariessa, stay and mark
This animated gem, whose fainter spark
Of fading light its birth had from the dark;

A star thought by the erring passenger,
Which falling from its native orb dropped here,
And makes the earth (its centre) now its sphere.

Should many of these sparks together be,
He that the unknown light far off should see
Would think it a terrestrial galaxy.

Take’t up, fair saint; see how it mocks thy fright,
The paler flame doth not yield heat, though light,
Which thus deceives thy reason, through thy sight.

But see how quickly it (ta’en up) doth fade;
To shine in darkness only being made,
By th’ brightness of thy light turned to a shade;

And burnt to ashes by thy flaming eyes
On the chaste altar of thy hand it dies,
As to thy greater light a sacrifice.

I can’t claim to know who Chariessa is. Wikipedia says: beetle? (But not a glow-worm?) Who’s the saint? St. Chariessa? Who’s that? Am I being dumb?

The first poetic reference to a star-map of the galaxy is actually earlier than Herschel. It’s in Dryden, writing about Cromwell (1659):

He fought secure of fortune as of fame
Till by new maps the Island might be shown,
Of Conquests which he strew’d where ‘e’re he came
Thick as the Galaxy with starr’s is sown.

It’s quite common to meet with stars and moons and suns and orbs and so forth in poetry. Still, Galaxy feels too modern – too SF – for Dryden, to me, but there it is.

If you like your galactic poetry galumphing, there’s always “The Lady of Shallot”:

The gemmy bridle glittered free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy.

If you think it’s best to keep on using Galaxy as a proper name for the Milky Way, Keats might be your man. Here he describes a swan:

He slants his neck beneath the waters bright
So silently, it seems a beam of light
Come from the galaxy:

And here:

The good-night blush of eve was waning slow,
And Vesper, risen star, began to throe
In the dusk heavens silverly, when they
Thus sprang direct towards the Galaxy.