The Music of the Spheres

Seven poets sing of the stars:

Look thou no further, but affix thine eye 

On that bright, shiny, round, still moving mass, 

The house of blessed gods, which men call sky, 

All sow'd with glist'ring stars more thick than grass, 

Whereof each other doth in brightness pass.

(Edmund Spenser)

The infinite shining heavens rose 

and I saw in the night

Uncountable angel stars

Showering sorrow and light.

(Robert Louis Stevenson)

Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.

There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings.

(Shakespeare)

The heavens declare the glory of God

And the firmament sheweth his handywork.

(King David (the Psalms), KJV Translation)

BEND low again, night of summer stars.

So near you are, sky of summer stars,

So near, a long arm man can pick off stars,

Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl,

So near you are, summer stars.

(Carl Sandburg)

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! 

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! 

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! 

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes! 

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

As I watch the bright stars shining, 

I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. 

A vast similitude interlocks all,

All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,

All distances of place however wide,

All distances of time, all inanimate forms,

All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in

different worlds,

All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, The fishes, the brutes,

All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,

All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,

All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,

This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,

And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

(Walt Whitman)