Poetry of the Stars

The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena VI ASP Conference Series, Vol. 441 Enrico Maria Corsini, ed. c 2011 Astronomical Society of the Paciﬁc

Poetry of the Stars

Piero Boitani Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne, “Sapienza” Universita` di Roma, Roma, Italy

Abstract. From Homer to the Bible looking at the heavenly vault is an enchanted moment in human life. It produces that wonder which Aristotle maintains is the beginning of the love of wisdom, that is to say of philosophy, science, and philomythia–the love of myth: poetry.

There is a moment in The Odyssey which is especially fascinating for those concerned with astronomy. In Book V, Odysseus is about to leave Ogygia, Calypso’s island, using the raft he has built to sail to Ithaca. The goddess has bathed him, adorned him in perfumed robes, and given him a goatskin brimming with red wine, and a haversack full of tasty food. She has also provided him with a favourable light wind. Odysseus raises his sails and commences his voyage upon the raft:

The wind lifting his spirits high, royal Odysseus spread sail–gripping the tiller, seated astern– and now the master mariner steered his craft, sleep never closing his eyes, forever scanning the stars, the Pleiades and the Plowman late to set and the Great Bear that mankind also calls the Wagon: she wheels on her axis always ﬁxed, watching the Hunter, and she alone is denied a plunge in the Ocean’s baths. Hers were the stars the lustrous goddess told him to keep hard to port as he cut across the sea.

Odysseus thus sails forth across the sea, travelling eastwards for seventeen days. On the eighteenth day, he catches sight of the shadowy mountains of the land of the Phaeacians, “a giant shield rising up from the dark sea”. Poseidon, at that moment returning from the great banquet with the Ethiopians, realises that the man responsible for blinding his son Polyphemus is about to arrive home at last, and issues a raging storm upon him, at the end of which a naked, salt-encrusted, and exhausted Odysseus finally makes it to the island of the Phaeacians. The passage I have just quoted does not overly impress us, for we have been famil- iar with star-guided navigation for thousands of years. But, as the first literary instance of such an undertaking, it must have struck the ancient Greeks enormously. Odysseus steers his raft by following the stars, a detail which, amongst others, renders Homer’s narrative extremely avant-garde, both scientifically and poetically. The hero’s gaze upon the heavens is neither contemplative nor aesthetic, but technical and functional: 289 290 Boitani as Calypso has urged, in order to maintain his course he is to steer constantly with the Great Bear to his left. At least three observations can be made here. Those of us who are scholars of literary traditions will point out that this becomes an actual topos, leading to a series of poetic rewritings: thus Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica, Virgil’s Aeneid and Geor- gics, Propertius’ Elegies, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Ars amandi, and Musaeus’ Hero all mark its continued existence in the classical world, thereafter transmitted to medi- aeval and modern literary culture. To give but an instance, Virgil describes in Aeneid III (512-517) the pilot Palinurus’ enchanted, rapt contemplation of the heavenly vault:

Necdum orbem medium Nox horis acta subibat: haud segnis strato surgit Palinurus et omnis explorat ventos, atque auribus aera captat; sidera cuncta notat tacito labentia caelo, Arcturum pluviasque Hyadas geminosque Triones, armatumque auro circumspicit Oriona.

(Night, led by the Hours, is not yet in mid-course: Palinurus rises alertly from his couch, tests all the winds, and listens to the breeze: he notes all the stars gliding through the silent sky, Arcturus, the rainy Pleiades, both the Bears, and surveys Orion, armed with gold.)1

If on the other hand we are historians of astronomy, we will emphasise what the passage tells us about the sky as perceived by the ancients. We will thus note that the configuration of the stars differs in no discernible way nowadays, although their behaviour has been changed by the position of the celestial pole, around which the stars appear to rotate. Although I am hardly going to embark upon an explanation of such matters to scientists, the phenomenon of precession clearly has important consequences for anyone interested in reconstructing the ancient maps of the sky (such as the globe of Atlante Farnese in Naples). Moreover, there is one aspect of the phenomenon which is of particular relevance here. Ursa Major continued to be the guide for the Greeks, as it was for Odysseus, while the Phoenicians had a less visible but more precise one in Ursa Minor, at that time around 4◦ degrees off the pole. Ursa Major–which Aristotle, quoting our passage in the Poetics, considers a “metaphor” for “everything”, namely, Draco, Ursa Minor and most of the Cepheus constellation–is, in Homer’s classification, the only exclusion from “the Ocean’s baths”, i.e., it does not plunge into the sea, and always remains visible. In Homer, the Earth is a flat disk surrounded by the river Ocean. Thus, when Odysseus looks at the stars, he provides a view of the ancient cosmos. While this is primarily a technical observation, we should also note that it alludes to the entire firmament. In Book XVIII of the Iliad, when Homer describes the shield of Achilles made by Hephaestus, the first layer of decorative engraving is in fact the entire cosmos. The passage is exactly parallel to the one from Odyssey V with which I began:

There he made the Earth and there the sky and the sea and the inexhaustible blazing Sun and the Moon rounding full and there the constellations, all that crown the heavens,

1Translation by A. S. Kline. See the website http://www.poetryintranslation.com/. Poetry of the Stars 291

the Pleiades and the Hyades, Orion in all his power too and the Great Bear that mankind also calls the Wagon: she wheels on her axis always fixed, watching the Hunter, and she alone is denied a plunge in the Ocean’s baths. Ulysses’ gaze is fixed on the stars. It is the start of a profound relationship between the Greek hero and the stars, a truly primeval scene: a total and cosmological gaze, and at the origin of an entire scientific, technical and poetic tradition. I wonder in fact to what extent it is distinguishable from a more specifically contemplative and aesthetic dimension. The early Homer, at the end of Iliad VIII, used a great simile to describe the countless fires lit by the Trojans during the night:

Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky glittering round the Moon’s brilliance blaze in all their glory when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm... all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffs and the steep ravines and down from the high heavens bursts the boundless bright air and all the stars shine clear and the shepherd’s heart exults–so many fires burned between the ships and the Xanthus’ whirling rapids set by the men of Troy, bright against their walls. This comparison naturally focuses on the enormous number of fires, and as such is no different, as image, from the promise God made to Abraham in Genesis: “Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them. So shall thy seed be”. But Homer adds two elements, the immense space which opens up below the vault, and the shepherd’s joy: infinity and pleasure (the shepherd later becoming the traditional contemplator of the heavens). Thus united, these provide the spectacle with a dimension of wonder in the face of immensity, of beauty bursting forth–in short, they add proto-aesthetic contemplation. The passage feels, because of the shepherd’s presence, akin to the later lyrical poetry of Sappho:

The stars around the beautiful Moon Hiding their glittering forms Whenever she shines full on Earth... Silver;

Hesperus, you bring back again What the dawn light scatters, Bringing the sheep: bringing the kid: Bringing the little child back to its mother;

The Moon is down. The Pleiades. Midnight, The hours ﬂow on, I lie, alone.

But there is quite a difference between Homer’s shepherd and Sappho’s I. The shepherd is an external observer, who participates with joy in the spectacle of night. On the other hand, Sappho’s stars reverberate through her I, their light is as it were filtered by 292 Boitani her eyes, and the entire show of the heavenly vault appears to be a splendid, but mere means to emphasise the poet’s love loneliness. Sappho is in this sense the archetype of the lyricism that, through Catullus and other Latin writers, will shape modern poetic feelings, for instance, Petrarch’s. How long does it take for Homer’s passages to develop into actual scientific en- quiry, for Odysseus to become a scientist? The available fragments with information on the life of Thales describe a man constantly engrossed in contemplating the stars: around 600 BC, he “discovered” and “fixed” the position of Ursa Minor, studied the heavenly bodies, and predicted the eclipses of the Sun and the solstices. Plato tells us that Thales was so engrossed in his stargazing that he stumbled into a well, much to the amusement and jibes of a Thracian maid. Aristotle, on the other hand, reports that he was so skilled in astronomy that he was able to predict an abundant harvest of olives and thus purchase at a low price all the oil presses of Miletus and Chios, selling them later on at a huge profit, thereby demonstrating that philosophy was by no means useless, and that it was not difficult for philosophers to achieve wealth, although this may not be their real concern. The philosopher-poet Parmenides, who in many ways founded Western thought with his theories about being and non-being, wrote in his On Nature that Truth told him that, by pursuing her, he would learn all the secrets of astronomy and cosmology. There is probably a gap of some one hundred and fifty years between Ulysses’ watching Ursa Major to establish his route and Thales’ observations of Ursa Minor. During this century and a half, Greece must have witnessed the development memorably described by Aristotle at the beginning of the Metaphysics, when looking into the reasons which led human beings to “philosophise”, to love knowledge and investigate natural phenomena with philosophical-scientific goals: to seek, as he says, first principles and causes, according to the equation knowledge (sophia) equals science (episteme) of those principles and causes. Aristotle writes: It was because of wonder that men both now and originally began to philosophise. To begin with, they wondered at those puzzles that were at hand, such as about the affections of the Moon and the events connected with the Sun and the stars and about the origins of the universe. Physics, astrophysics, and cosmology are thus products of early humanity’s original puzzlement, and they continue to be the products of that astonishment (“now and originally”, says Aristotle). Those who experience a sense of doubt and wonder, he contin- ues, realise that they do not know: thus, to free themselves of ignorance, human beings started to “philosophise”. Here Aristotle picks up a concept expressed earlier by Plato in the Theaetetus, according to which “it is a characteristic of the lover of wisdom to be full of wonder; and philosophy has no other beginning but this”. Aristotle, however, goes beyond his predecessor, introducing a new and extraordinary element, for he draws a parallel between the investigator of natural phenomena and the philosopher on the one hand and the lover of myths on the other, namely, the poet: “hence the lover of stories (philomythos) is, in a way”, he says, “a lover of wisdom, since a story is composed of wonders”. To set poetry on the same level as what Einstein later called “heilige Neugier”, holy curiosity, is no small matter: it means tracing the greatest ac- tions of humanity to a single impulse. And perceiving poetry as possessing a dimension of truth which is generally denied to it. This, perhaps, is the sense of Thomas Aquinas’ comment on the passage from Aristotle. Its terms are singularly inverted, with the ”philosopher” now the subject of the sentence, and the “philomythes” the predicate of the copula: Poetry of the Stars 293

And since wonder was the cause that led to philosophy, it is evident that the philosopher is in a way a philomythes, that is, a lover of stories, which is proper of poets. Hence the first who dealt with the principles of things in a fable-like manner are called theologizing poets, such as Perseus and others who are called the Seven Sages. The reason why the philosopher is likened to the poet is that both deal with things full of wonder. In fact the stories with which the poets deal are made up of wonderful things. The philosopher–and here I am talking about the philosopher not only in the technical sense but also as a scientist–becomes, “in a way”, “philomythes”, that is, lover of tales, “which is proper of poets”. Later, rephrasing Aristotle, who identifies the ancients prior to Thales as the first to deal with the gods, Thomas mentions “the three theologising poets who made songs about divine things” as among “the first famous in science” (scientia) among the Greeks: Orpheus, Musaeus, and Linus. What would we say if someone proposed to equate Dante with Thomas himself? Or, along similar lines, if Michelangelo and Tasso were equated with Galileo, Mil- ton and Haydn with Descartes and Newton, Einstein with Joyce, Bohr with Thomas Mann, Heisenberg with Schoenberg? The ancients were right in pursuing the unity of knowledge, identifying common inspirations and impulses, considering philosophy, theology, science, and poetry as all deriving from the puzzlement that grips us in the face of things visible and invisible. Dante, simultaneously philosopher and poet, puts it well in the Convivio, developing these passages from Aristotle and Thomas, together with Thomas’ comment on Nichomachean Ethics:

For wonder, awe (stupore) is a certain bewilderment of the mind at seeing or hearing great and wonderful things, or feeling them in some way. These, in so far as they are great, make him who feels them reverent towards them: in so far as they appear wonderful, they make him who feels them desirous of knowing them. Thomas and Dante are Christians who read Aristotle some ﬁfteen hundred years after he lived, without knowing Greek and without being able to read Homer. However, they have another pretty strong source of star poetry, the Bible. The Hebrew Bible–the Old Testament–presented men of the Middle Ages with astonishingly poetic images of the ﬁrmament, always related to the power of God the Creator. Psalm 19 famously begins by singing:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the ﬁrmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. Yahweh himself reproaches Job with thundering words:

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the Earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7) This passage is particularly notable because in the last verse, by virtue of the poetic technique of Sapiential poetry, an equation seems to be established between the morning stars singing together and the angels, the sons of God, shouting for joy. Cer- tainly, the equation percolated through centuries of Christian poetry and painting (e.g., 294 Boitani

William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job). In that same chapter, God’s reproach to Job goes further, mentioning speciﬁc constellations:

Canst thou bind the sweet inﬂuences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the Earth? (Job 38:31-33). The transcendent, immense power of God is celebrated here to the detriment of man. God, as Psalm 147:4 declares, “telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names”, a passage which Petrarch, Leopardi, and Valery´ echoed many centuries later. But the Bible, which considers man so small when compared to the cosmos, also knows that he is second only to the angels and thus in a sense greater than stars. Psalm 8:3-5 proclaims:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the Moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. The influence of this kind of Biblical poetry on our imagination and art has been enormous. In his Creation, Franz Joseph Haydn has the soprano echo the Book of Job and then the angels sing Psalm 19. Medieval mosaics of the Creation often give particular prominence to the making of the firmament, of the Sun and of the Moon (Genesis 1:6-8 and 1:14-19). In Monreale this is magnificently represented by two scenes, the Creation of the Angels as Lights (the stars of the morning), and the Creation of Sun and Moon at the centre of the firmament. Here in Venice, in the concentric circles of St. Mark’s Genesis Cupola, the astral scenes of the Beginning are four. The beauty of light, so important in the Middle Ages (Thomas Aquinas himself maintained the three criteria for pulchritudo are integritas, consonantia, and claritas) is essential for writers and painters alike. Boethius, who was a Christian imbued with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and who may have composed a De institutione astronomica, filled his Consolation of Philosophy with wonderful star imagery, at once cosmic, philosophical, theological, and personal. The great hymn 5 of Book I, “O stelliferi conditor orbis”, celebrates the power of God the Creator and the beauties of the sky by combining both Biblical and classical allusions, but earlier on, in metrum 2 of the same Book, Philosophy, who has just appeared, opens her address to the writer by lamenting on his state:

This man [she says] has been free to the open heaven: his habit has it been to wander into the paths of the sky: his to watch the light of the bright Sun, his to inquire into the brightness of the chilly Moon; he, like a conqueror, held fast bound in its order every star that makes its wandering circle, turning its peculiar course. Nay, more, deeply has he searched into the springs of nature, whence came the roaring blasts that ruffle the ocean’s bosom calm: what is the spirit that makes the firmament revolve. Boethius lived, and died, in Ravenna, and Ravenna was at that very time being decorated by star motifs which originally came from Byzantium. The vaults of the Galla Placidia mausoleum, as well as the apses of S. Apollinare in Classe and of the Archiepiscopal Chapel have splendid mosaics where hundreds of golden stars shine on Poetry of the Stars 295 the blue background, symbolising both the sky and heaven. The fashion soon spread throughout Europe, and churches all over were topped by magnificent blue and gold- speckled vaults (e.g., Sainte-Chapelle, Paris; S. Francesco, Assisi; St. Mary, Krako´w; Duomo, Siena; Scrovegni’s Chapel, Padua; S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome). The vault of the Sistine Chapel, before Michelangelo painted on it the Creation at the beginning of the 16th century, had 5,000 square meters of blue sky with gold stars. Secular rulers imitated such design in order to stress the God-given, universal nature of their rule. The Holy Roman German Emperor Henry II, for instance, had a ceremonial mantle embroidered for him which had the same pattern. Another writer who like Boethius lived, and died, in Ravenna is of course Dante. And Dante’s star poetry is so intense, and so frequent that I can only choose a few passages from the Comedy to illustrate it. The fact that all three cantiche of the poem end with the word stelle (replacing Virgil’s umbrae) is by itself significant. But we should also remember that at the very beginning of the Comedy Dante places a passage which he repeats not only at the end of the Inferno, but also in the very last line of the Paradiso. He points out in Inferno I(37-40) that the time of day and of the year when he found himself in the dark wood was the same as that of God’s creation of the firmament:

Temp’era dal principio del mattino, e ’l sol montava ’n su con quelle stelle ch’eran con lui quando l’amor divino mosse di prima quelle cose belle.

(The time was the beginning of the morning, and up the Sun was mounting with those stars that with him were, what time the Love Divine at ﬁrst in motion set those beauteous things.)

At the end of the poem, shortly after describing his vision of God, Dante tells us that his desire and his will were now made to revolve, like a wheel that moves evenly, by the love that moves the Sun and the other stars: “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle”. In short, he is now being re-created, becoming a human part of Creation, like the Sun, like all stars. As if this were not enough, Dante uses the stars for special poetic, narrative eﬀects, to describe the landscape of Purgatory, and to convey the brightness and the movements of the blessed in Paradise. The best example of the former is the story recounted by Ulysses in Inferno XXVI (star poetry and the Ulysses myth obviously have something in common). Here, too, as in the Odyssey, there is a route, this time towards the west, and later southwest, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Here too, the sky provides a point of reference. When the vessel sails beyond Gibraltar and into the unexplored Atlantic,

Tutte le stelle gia` de l’altro polo vedea la notte, e ’l nostro tanto basso che non surgea fuor del marin suolo.

(At night I now could see the other pole and all its stars; the star of ours had fallen and never rose above the plain of the ocean.) 296 Boitani

The Pole Star has disappeared, and the stars of the southern hemisphere are now visible. In his story of Ulysses, Dante does not specify which stars these are, but in Canto I of Purgatorio, when in the ﬁction of the poem he reaches the place where his Ulysses is shipwrecked, that [... ] lito diserto che mai non vide navicar sue acque omo che di tornar sia poscia esparto

(the desert shore That never saw man sail its waters who after had experience of return) he sees, in the antarctic heavenly pole, [... ] quattro stelle non viste mai fuor ch’a la prima gente

(four stars never seen before but by the first people), that is, stars never gazed upon by any human being after Adam and Eve in the Earthly Paradise, which Dante sets in the southern hemisphere at the top of Mount Purgatory. The four mysterious stars allegorise the four cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, forti- tude and temperance, but they may well be astronomically genuine, corresponding to the four stars of the Southern Cross which appeared in the ancient maps, although not as a self-sufficient constellation, and were known to sailors and astronomers (as Dante was aware, the Almagest star catalogue stated that eight of the fifteen brightest stars were located in the southern hemisphere). The celestial horizon has grown, and Odysseus’ route, having become that of Ulysses, is now towards the “other pole”. Dante, who clearly dislikes this development which he himself invents, is in fact altogether more interested in a different kind of star poetry, that which permeates the Paradiso. Here, he uses the night sky to represent the aspect and the movement of the blessed souls, who have no individual visage but appear to him as lights. Making poetry out of light is an extremely difficult enterprise, but Dante seizes on his material with immense kinetic strength. His stars are never, so to speak, fixed, still in the sky, but always moving: in fact, dancing and singing. I have no space here to discuss all the wonderful passages of the Paradiso that deal with the cosmos, but will concentrate on just a few. Let me start with two terzinas from Paradiso XXIII. Here, the Moon and the stars appear like divine nymphs smiling and adorning the sky: Quale ne’ plenilunii sereni Trivia ride tra le ninfe etterne che dipingon lo ciel per tutti i seni, vid’i’ sopra migliaia di lucerne un sol che tutte quante l’accendea, come fa ’l nostro le viste superne.

(Like Trivia–at the full Moon in clear skies– smiling among the everlasting nymphs who Poetry of the Stars 297

decorate all reaches of the sky, I saw a sun above a thousand lamps; it kindled all of them as does our Sun kindle the sights above us here on Earth.

But Dante is fond of the moments of threshold. He loves the twilight in which the Sun sets and the stars begin to emerge, or when the Moon rises and the stars gradually become invisible. In Canto XIV he uses two star similes one after the other. In the ﬁrst, as later in Canto XX, one can actually follow the setting of the Sun in our hemisphere, the waning of day–its consummation–and the rising of the stars with their at ﬁrst uncertain light:

E s`ı come al salir di prima sera comincian per lo ciel nove parvenze, s`ı che la vista pare e non par vera, parvermi l`ı novelle sussistenze cominciare a vedere, e fare un giro di fuor da l’altre due circonferenze.

(And even as, at the approach of evening, new lights begin to show along the sky, so that the sight seems and does not seem real, it seemed to me that I began to see new spirits there, forming a ring beyond the choirs with their two circumferences.)

Yet Dante is also capable of contemplating the celestial vault with the rapt pleasure of Homer’s shepherd. When he climbs to the Heaven of Mars in this same Canto XIV, he sees the souls there form a cross of light, like, he says, the Milky Way glitters, white, in lesser and larger lights:

Come distinta da minori e maggi lumi biancheggia tra’ poli del mondo Galassia s`ı, che fa dubbiar ben saggi; s`ı costellati facean nel profondo Marte quei raggi il venerabil segno che fan giunture di quadranti in tondo.

(As, graced with lesser and with larger lights between the poles of the world, the Galaxy gleams so that even sages are perplexed; so, constellated in the depth of Mars, those rays described the venerable sign a circle’s quadrants form where they are joined.)

Above all, his heavens, in moving, produce an extraordinarily harmonious sound–the music of the spheres of which Pythagoras, Plato, Cicero, Calcidius, Guillaume de Conches and Alain de Lille had spoken. This is announced in the very ﬁrst Canto of the Paradiso (76-81), and later, at the opening of the Wisdom cantos of the Heaven of the Sun, it becomes–yet another revalidation of ancient theories and images–a dance-like movement (XIII, 1-24). 298 Boitani

I should add that only another post-classical writer–and another supreme one at that–has alluded to the music of the spheres with the same intensity as Dante: Shake- speare. In a beautiful scene of The Merchant of Venice he has Lorenzo invite Jessica to sit down in the sweetness of the moonlight and look at the stars:

Sit, Jessica. Look how the ﬂoor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold. There’s not the smallest orb which thou beholdest But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins; Such harmony is in immortal souls, But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. Later, another Shakespearean character, Pericles, hears the same music. Pericles has just found and recognised his long lost daughter Marina, whom he believed dead. At the end of the amazing recognition scenes, he suddenly hesitates and asks those sur- rounding him: “But, what music?”. And when they reply they hear none, he exclaims:

None! The music of the spheres!... Rarest sounds! Do ye not hear?... Most heavenly music!It nips me unto listening, and thick slumber. Hangs upon mine eyes: let me rest. Pericles, like Dante, hears the metaphysical music the stars play in revolving around the Earth in their spheres. The supreme harmony and the infinite variety of the heavens is what poets and artists alike, in completely different parts of the world, also concentrated upon. The domes of the Islamic world, from Isfahan in Persia to the Alhambra in Granada, are intricate patterns celebrating the incommensurable geometry, beauty, and splendour of the sky. From Omar Khayyam in Persia to Ibn Hamdis in Sicily star images recur time and again in Islamic poetry. Here are two samples: This Universal wheel, this merry-go-round In our imagination we have found The Sun a flame, in the Cosmic lantern bound We are mere ghosts, revolving, the flame surround. Often at night I look at the stars, which look Like lit up fuses or lightening cusps. I see the rising Pleiades, and they look like a string Of seven pearls with which you made a necklace. Islam, of course, adopted the crescent Moon and the star as symbol of its faith. If the Greeks had given names to Constellations, the Arabs named single stars. And their encyclopedias of astronomy and natural science are masterpieces unsurpassed in the West until much later. One such work, the Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing by the Persian-born Zakariyya’¯ Ibn Muhammad Al-Qazw¯ın¯ı, even goes back to Aristotle’s theory of wonder as expounded in the Metaphysics. Much more to the East, in China, astronomy was as, if not more, advanced than in the Arab world. The star charts of the Celestial Empire go back to at least 1000 BC, when Wu Xian apparently drew his, but between the 7th and the 11th century of our era the Chinese produced two outstanding astronomical atlases, the so-called Dunhuang Poetry of the Stars 299 chart and the map elaborated by Su Song. Chinese painters, who drew stunningly beautiful, delicate, and sublime, landscapes for thousands of years, unfortunately could not depict a dark night lit up by the stars, because the kind of paper they used did not support the heavy weight of black ink. But the poets more than make up for the absence of painting, and among them the prominence of the 8th century Tu Fu is absolutely indisputable in this respect. I offer here two examples, the first of which (in a rather literal translation) approaches the vastness and depth of Homer’s simile in Iliad VIII, while the second (in Kenneth Rexroth famous rendering) speaks by itself:

Full Moon

Above the tower–a lone, twice-sized Moon. On the cold river passing night-ﬁlled homes, It scatters restless gold across the waves. On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze. Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars, Not yet ﬂawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon Spreading in my old garden... All light, All ten thousand miles at once in its light!

Autumn Night

The Autumn night is clear After the thunderstorm. Venus glows on the river. The Milky Way is white as snow. The dark sky is vast and deep. The Northern Crown sets in the dusk. The Moon like a clear mirror Rises from the great void. When it Has climbed high in the sky, moonlit Frost glitters on the chrysanthemums.

The cosmos shines, clear and pure, in this poem, where the sense of the infinite void, of a sky dark, vast and deep, dominates everything. Yet the immense emptiness gradually fills with starry lights–a single star at first, Venus; then the whole Silver River, the Milky Way. While Corona Borealis sets in the dusk, the Moon rises in the sky. The Moon is described as a shining mirror, but this unexpectedly reverberates in the frost that glitters on the flowers. The contrast between dominating void and incipient plenitude, between darkness and light, between obscurity and whiteness (from the Milky Way’s snow-like appearance to the moonlit frost on the chrysanthemums). The universe is displayed up there in all its claritas and glory, and then finds itself mirrored in the small corolla of a flower. Apart from Dante, it takes European art several centuries to reach this kind of refined perspective. Petrarch, for instance, is, unlike Dante, a static star poet. The cosmos seems to revolve around him and to shine by virtue of his heart. The poet’s I, even more than in Sappho, filters all perception of the universe. Because Petrarch was a model for all subsequent European poetry, the star topoi he consecrated were handed 300 Boitani down, with endless variations, for the next four centuries. Thus, the eyes of the beloved are like stars, the starry night is serene and quiet while the poet is restless, stars are cruel because they have made the poet “sensibil terra”, the poet wants a starry night to lie with his lady, who is herself a star. Yet Petrarch, who is a supreme lyricist, knows perfectly well how to appreciate the spectacle of the night sky. The nocturne of Sonnet 164 is a wonderful painting: Or che ’l ciel et la terra e ’l vento tace et le fere e gli augelli il sonno affrena, Notte il carro stellato in giro mena et nel suo letto il mar senz’onda giace

(Now that sky and earth and wind are silent, and sleep calms down animals and birds, Night leads her starry chariot round, and without waves the sea lies in its bed.) Furthermore, Petrarch is the first poet in Italy to apply the adjective vaghe to the stars, as well as to use the verb fiammeggiar to their shining and to employ the expression derived from Genesis, “ad una ad una annoverar le stelle” to express the impossibility of fully describing the beauty of Laura–in sum, her ineffability. It is from these Petrarchan poems that, five centuries later, Leopardi will draw his inspiration. The Renaissance shows as intense a love of the heavenly vault as the Middle Ages. People, however, seem to look at the sky with new eyes, focusing more and more on its constellations, their mythological associations, and the meaning they have in astrology. Star gazers fill the landscape of a marvellous 16th century French tapestry. In another, Flemish tapestry of the 15th century, the motions of the planets are depicted together with the mechanism of the entire cosmos. Fernando Gallego paints in the Salamanca Library El cielo de Salamanca (1490). The domes of the Florentine Cappella Pazzi and the Sacrestia Vecchia of San Lorenzo, of Cappella Chigi in Rome (on Raphael’s drawings), the vaults of the Villa Farnesina in Rome (by Baldassarre Peruzzi) and of the Sala dello Zodiaco in the Palazzo Ducale of Mantua (by Lorenzo Costa), as well as their 20th century successors in New York Grand Central Station and in the Council Chamber of Mississauga, Ontario, City Hall, are eloquent enough. A new perception, however, seems to begin now, towards the end of the 16th century, as if poetry and painting were anticipating the astronomical revolution that took place between Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. In describing the descent of the Archangel Michael from Paradise to Earth, Tasso, for instance, still clinging to the old model of the universe, shows he feels both the infinity and the claritas of the spheres, “eternity’s happy, flaming fields” and “the pure crystal and the circle / that turns and turns jeweled with stars”, and compares Michael to a falling star: “so / does a star, cleaving the liquid air serene, / fall into the bosom of Great Mother Earth”. Tasso is a great night poet, but there are wonderful parallels in painting, too. In 1609 Adam Elsheimer produced a picture of The Flight into Egypt where some of the constellations in the Northern sky are reproduced. Then, the story changes. The new astronomy slowly takes over (as shown by Jo- hannes Vermeer in his The Astronomer), and poets and painters alike take due note of it. While concentrating on the vagueness and vastness which will appeal to the Roman- tics (see Canaletto’s La vigilia di Santa Marta), a new precision emerges, for instance in the pictures by Donato Creti and the globes of Coronelli for Louis XIV. Baroque Poetry of the Stars 301 poets, such as Gongora and Quevedo in Spain, celebrate the stars with unprecedented splendour, the latter devoting to them a magnificent hymn. In England, Milton crowns his account of the Creation in Book VII of Paradise Lost with two amazing lines: “And sowed with stars the heav’n thick as gold”, and “With thousand thousand stars that then appeared / Spangling the universe”. Finally, after Newton–and after Kant, who works on astrophysics and proclaims that “only two things fill the soul with always new and growing wonder and awe: the starry sky above me and moral law within me”–infinity opens up at the beginning of the 19th century with Romanticism. Novalis’ Hymnen an die Nacht, the poetry of Lamar- tine and Leopardi, and the paintings that come now from all over Europe and America all show this explosion of the sentimental as well as physical boundaries of the cosmos. Here is Blake giving a visual representation of Job’s morning stars, Turner painting The Evening Star in the twilight, Karl Friedrich Schinkel drawing the scenery for Mozart’s Magic Flute, Caspar David Friedrich showing us a Monk by the Sea, almost disappear- ing in front of the ocean’s infinity and beneath the dark vastness of the sky, and later Victor Hugo himself painting Melancholy as a lone planet, or half dark solar disc, Au- gust Strindberg devoting himself to Celestographs, Whistler giving us a Nocturne in Black and Gold with Falling Rockets, and finally Alfred Stevens depicting, between 1885 and 1892, a Moonlit Landscape and an astounding Milky Way. The 19th is also the century when the night enters music. After Haydn’s Creation and Mozart’s Kleine Nachtmusik and Magic Flute, Beethoven apparently sets the tone with a Sonata which was immediately called Moonlight, and Nocturnes are composed by Schubert, Chopin, and later Debussy. The greatest of all European night poets in the 19th century is Giacomo Leopardi. Throughout his life, Leopardi struggled to create poetry that might equal Homer’s simile in Iliad VIII, which he also translated. He came pretty close to it in the opening of La sera del d`ı di festa (“Dolce e chiara e` la notte e senza vento”, “The night is sweet and clear, without a breeze”, a verbal Moonlight Sonata) and of Le ricordanze (“Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, io non credea / tornare ancor per uso a contemplarvi”, “Beautiful stars of the Bear, I did not think / I would come back to contemplate you”), but nowhere are astropoetics, Homer, the Bible, and the entire Western lyrical tradition summed up as in the Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia and in the later La Ginestra. As in the simile of the Iliad, in the Canto notturno Leopardi’s shepherd marvels at the spectacle of the stars, turns to the Moon and asks: “Che fai tu, luna, in ciel? dimmi, che fai, / silenziosa luna?” (“What are you doing, Moon, in the sky? Tell me, what / are you doing, silent Moon?”). His question is cosmo-existential, since he compares his own life to that of the night Moon and asks what they are worth. He attributes the Moon superior knowledge:

Pur tu, solinga, eterna pellegrina, che s`ı pensosa sei, tu forse intendi, questo viver terreno, il patir nostro, il sospirar, che sia; che sia questo morir, questo supremo scolorar del sembiante, e perir dalla terra, e venir meno ad ogni usata, amante compagnia. E tu certo comprendi il perche´ delle cose, e vedi il frutto del mattin, della sera, 302 Boitani

del tacito, inﬁnito andar del tempo.

(Yet you, lonely, eternal pilgrim who are so pensive, perhaps you understand, what this living on Earth, our suﬀering, our sighing, what they might mean; what our dying means, this supreme paling of our visage and perishing from the Earth, and losing every daily, loving company. And you certainly understand the why of things, you see the purpose of morning and of evening, of the silent, inﬁnite course of time.)

He then observes himself in the act of contemplating the stars. How diﬀerent this sentiment is from that of Homer’s shepherd! The same immensity of space which brightened the heart of the shepherd in the Iliad here becomes an emblem of emptiness, of human solitude.

Spesso, quand’io ti miro star cos`ı muta in sul deserto piano, che, in suo giro lontano, al ciel confina; ovver con la mia greggia seguirmi viaggiando a mano a mano; e quando miro in cielo arder le stelle; dico fra me pensando: a che tante facelle? che fa l’aria infinita, e quel profondo infinito seren? che vuol dir questa solitudine immensa? ed io che sono? Cos`ı meco ragiono: e della stanza smisurata e superba, e dell’innumerabile famiglia; poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti d’ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa, girando senza posa, per tornar sempre la` donde son mosse; uso alcuno, alcun frutto indovinar non so.

Often [Leopardi’s shepherd says] when I see you stand mute over the desert plain, which in its remote horizon borders with the sky, or journeying, step by step, follow me and my flock; and when I see the stars burn in the sky– I say musing to myself: What for so many flames? What is the infinite air doing, and that deep infinite serene? What does this immense Poetry of the Stars 303

solitude mean? And what am I? Thus with myself I reason: and to the measureless, superb stance, to the numberless beings, to so much travail and many motions of every heavenly, every earthly body, which without pause revolve to always go back there whence they started– I can see no use, no purpose can I fathom. Like Ecclesiastes, Leopardi has the ability to go straight to the vain root of things, setting out the wonderful mechanisms of the cosmos and the splendid constitution of human beings in the light of the most extreme rationalism. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he subjects

this most excellent canopy, the air, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majesti- cal roof fretted with golden fire’ to the eye of melancholy, turning it into ‘nothing but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. This melancholy, however, is not only a disease of the individual soul: it is a healthy metaphysical radicalism. We see it once again in La Ginestra, where the spectacle of the “flaming stars” (derived from Petrarch, Canzoniere 22, 11) “in purissimo azzurro” (“in purest blue”) above the dismal land of lava hardened by Vesuvius, is set against the nothingness of humanity, and where the sight of the “ancor piu` senza’alcun fin remoti / nodi quasi di stelle, / ch’a noi paion qual nebbia” (“those even more endlessly remote / knots, almost, of stars, / which to us look like mist”) provokes “laughter or pity”. And here we must recognize that the tirade against “le magnifiche sorti e progressive” (“the magnificent fates of progress”) strikes home deeply. With radical nihilism, the entire construct of philosphy and science is cast into an abyss in front of which there stands only that “noble nature” which a sollevar s’ardisce gli occhi mortali incontra al comun fato, e che con franca lingua, nulla al ver detraendo, confessa il mal che ci fu dato in sorte, e il basso stato e frale.

(dares to rise mortal eyes up against common fate, and frankly, without hiding the truth, acknowledges the evil, and the low, frail state we were allotted.) The joyful astonishment of Homer’s shepherd and Dante’s trembling and stunned mind have turned into a pained marvel at evil, well beyond the Psalms’ recognition of man’s smallness in the universe. The same wandering Asian shepherd nonetheless admits that, if he had wings to fly above the clouds “e noverar le stelle ad una ad una” (“number the stars one by one”, the verse is modelled on Petrarch, Canzoniere 127, 85), he might be happier. This 304 Boitani must be the hope that keeps contemporary aeronautics, astrophysics, star poetry and painting alive. At the beginning of the 20th century the cosmos widens enormously in space and time. Painters such as Van Gogh and Munch, and later the Italian Futurists Pellizza da Volpedo, Balla, and Crali, as well as the great exponents of the various Avant-garde movements Klee, Kandinsky, Kupka, and the Giacomettis see the cosmos as an explosion of lights, a series of apocalyptic spirals, infinite intersecting circles, bright flowery spots in the darkness, or pure total obscurity between a mountain, the sea, and the sky. No one has caught the same expansion of the night sky outside and inside the human being as Rainer Maria Rilke, Giuseppe Ungaretti, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann. Besides filling his Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies with wonderful astral imagery, Rilke intended to collect his star poetry in the Gedichte an die Nacht, of which I give here one magnificent example, entitled Night Sky and Star Fall, where the reciprocal reflection of the vault and human eyes, and the normal yet apocalyptic fall of a star, end up in universal questions: Der Himmel, groß, voll herrlicher Verhaltung, ein Vorrat Raum, ein U¨ bermaß von Welt. Und wir, zu ferne fu¨r die Angestaltung, zu nahe fu¨r die Abkehr hingestellt. Da fa¨llt ein Stern! Und unser Wunsch an ihn, bestu¨rzten Aufblicks, dringend angeschlossen: Was ist begonnen, und was ist verflossen? Was ist verschuldet? Und was ist verziehn?

(Heaven, mighty, full of glorious withholding, a store of space, a staggering world-display. And we, too distant for a full beholding, and yet too near it all to turn away. A falling star, with which our scarcely-owned heart’s wish, with startlet uplook, is descending: What is the beginning now and is the ending? what’s been committed? What has been condoned?) Ungaretti, on the other hand, catches the ephemeral quality of the stars, which have become mere myths, “fables”, and will fall like leaves as soon as the wind blows. Yet the poem ends with the hope of a new breath, that will bring a new glittering up above: Tornano in alto ad ardere le favole.

Cadranno come foglie al primo vento.

Ma venga un altro soﬃo, Ritornera` scintillamento nuovo.

(Up on high the fables burn again.

They shall fall like leaves with the ﬁrst wind.

But if another breath comes, A new glittering will return.) Poetry of the Stars 305

In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain Hans Castorp contemplates the mountains, the woods, and the sky at night from his balcony in the Davos Sanatorium. The view is spellbinding, crystal clear, pure, frozen, death-like. It is by looking at this panorama that Castorp begins to meditate on the human body, going back to cells and atoms and their structure, so similar to the solar system: Klarer Frost herrschte, reine, gesicherte Winterspracht um Mitte November, und das Panorama hinter den Bogen der Balkonloge, die bepuderten Wa¨lder, die we- ichgefu¨llten Schlu¨fte, die weisse, sonnige Tal unter dem blaustrahlenden Himmel, war herrlich. Abends gar, wenn der fast gerundete Mond erschien, verzauberte sich die Welt und ward wunderbar. Kristallisches Geflimmer, diamantnes Glitzern herrschte weit und breit. Sehr weiss und schwarz standen die Wa¨lder. Die dem Monde fernen Himmelsgegenden lagen dunkel, mit Sternen bestickt. Scharfe, genaue und intensive Schatten, die wirklicher und bedeutender schienen als die Dinge selbst, fielen von den Haüsern, den Baümen, den Telegraphenstangen auf die blitzende Flac¨ he. Es hatte sieben oder acht Grad Frost ein paar Stunden nach Sonnenuntergang. In einige Reinheit schien die Welt gebannt, ihre natu¨rliche Un- sauberkeit zugedeckt und erstarrt im Traum eines phantastischen Todeszaubers.

(A bright hard frost and settled winter splendour reigned in the middle of Novem- ber. The arch of the loggia framed a glorious panorama of snow-powdered forest, softly filled passes and ravines, white, sunlit valleys, and radiant blue heavens above all. In the evening, when the almost full Moon appeared, the world lay in enchanted splendour, marvellous. Crystal and diamond it glittered far and wide, the forest stood up very black and white, the quarter of the heavens where the Moon was not showed deeply dark, embroidered with stars. On the flashing surface of the snow, shadows, so strong, so sharp and clearly outlined that they seemed almost more real than the objects themselves, fell from houses, trees, and telegraph-poles. An hour or so after sunset there would be some fourteen degrees of frost. The world seemed spellbound in icy purity, its earthly blemishes veiled; it lay fixed in a deathlike, enchanted trance.) In James Joyce’s Ulysses the Jewish Irishman, Leopold Bloom finally returns home late in the night after his wanderings through Dublin, accompanied by his young friend, the intellectual Stephen Dedalus. During the conversation at Bloom’s home, the two friends go out to the back garden. The “spectacle” before them is that of “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit”. Bloom points out the various constellations to his friend, and simultaneously meditates. He meditates for five pages: on the constellations observed by Odysseus during his voyage; on the movement, birth, and death of the stars and galaxies; on “the eons of geological periods” and the incalculable number of minuscule beings which inhabit Earth, themselves making up “universes of void space”; on the impossibility of calculating precisely such entities constantly dividing “till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached”; on the inhabitability of the planets and extraterrestrial satellites; on the problem of the “possible redemption” of aliens; on the various characteristics of the constellations. I cannot quote the entire passage, which flows like a tumultuous river bearing all sorts of debris, firmly logical in its reasoning, like Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, specious like the discourse of a Jesuit, swinging from the macrocosm of the universe to the microcosm of man, suspended precisely between scientific information and ex- altation on the one hand, and on the other consideration of the world’s attachment to “vanities, to vanities of vanities and to all that is vanity”. Let me just say that this astro- 306 Boitani physical meditation includes “the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way”; Sirius, Arcturus, the precession of equinoxes; “Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained”; “moribund and nascent stars such as Nova in 1901”; “our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules”; the colours, brilliance, size and position of clusters; “the waggoner’s star: Walsingham way: the chariot of David: the annular cinctures of Saturn”; “the con- densation of spiral nebulae into suns”; “the interdependent gyrations of double suns”; “the independent synchronous discoveries of Galileo, Simon Marius, Piazzi, Le Ver- rier, Herschel, Galle”; “the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes of distances and squares of times of revolution”; finally, the possibility that celestial bodies might influence earthly ones, and the coincidence between astral phenomena and historical or personal events. Thus we have this Ulysses’ summing-up of the astronomy and astrophysics of the start of the 20th century, a short history of these sciences in modernity, and a continuous systolic-diastolic movement of expansion and contraction. Moreover, Leopold Bloom will soon embark upon a cosmic voyage, albeit only of the imagination, which will lead him like a comet “beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space” and then back to Earth, to Dublin, home, to take his revenge as Odysseus and the Count of Montecristo. The scene ends only when Leopold and Stephen, after urinating, watch a star fall

with great apparent velocity across the ﬁrmament from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Tress of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo.

Shortly beforehand, Bloom has reached conclusions which are worth quoting here. They are twofold, on the one hand logico-philosophical, and on the other–signiﬁcantly– aesthetic in nature:

His (Bloom’s) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing for possible error? That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heaven- man. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown: an infinity renderable equally finite by the suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space, remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its possible spectators had entered actual present existence.

Was he more convinced of the esthetic value of the spectacle? Indubitably in consequence of the reiterated examples of poets in the delirium of the frenzy of attachment or in the abasement of rejection invoking ardent sympa- thetic constellations or the frigidity of the satellite of their planet.

One would notice here that the aesthetic value of the cosmos is entirely subjective, resting as it does on the personal feelings of poets and their consequent invocations of the stars or the Moon. We are far from Stephen Dedalus’ objective, Thomist criteria for beauty in the Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Stephen agrees with Aquinas that the three requirements for pulchritudo are integritas, consonantia, and claritas. If applied to the universe, these would bring us close to the concepts developed by physicist Bruno Poetry of the Stars 307

Bertotti in his La bellezza dell’universo, where, certainly not by chance, he mentions Piero della Francesca and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. The journey from the Odyssey to Joyce’s Ulysses is as long as Western civilization, but Ulysses’ relationship with the stars is constant and intense. Here, the relativistic cosmos produces a non-place, a utopia, where space and time are merely two sides of the same dimension, but where “the aesthetic value of the spectacle” has become fundamental. 2001. A Space Odyssey leads to the same utopia. Luigi Dallapiccola’s Ulysses takes us back to questioning stemming from wonder. In the opera, Ulysses repeats over and over “Guardare, meravigliarsi, e tornar a guardare” (“Look, marvel, and look again”) and, like Leopardi’s shepherd, asks himself “Stelle... Perche´ tanto diverse m’apparite / in questa notte? Quando / fu stabilito il vostro corso, e come?” (“Stars... why do you appear so diﬀerent to me tonight? When was your course established, and how?”). Ulysses is also the “symbol of the seeker” dominating one of the last compo- sitions of the greatest American poet of the 21st century, Wallace Stevens. In The Sail of Ulysses the Greek hero crosses “the giant sea” by night, steering his boat “under the middle stars” and claiming that

knowledge is the only life, The only Sun of the only day, The only access to true ease, The deep comfort of the world and fate.

“As I know, I am and have / the right to be”, he proclaims, and creates his universe as though he were a demiurge, “As if another sail went on / Straight forwardly through another night / And clumped stars dangled all the way”. The passing from modernity to post-modernity is marked by two sensational events, the theory of the expansion of the universe and the Big Bang on the one hand, and the fact that, beginning in 1969, man can look at the stars and indeed at his own planet from outside Earth, from another celestial body. Both have incalculable effects on our imagination, and I have always wondered if they are not somehow reflected in the art of the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. In fact, unlike the change in perspective by which Renaissance art anticipated the new scientific model and discoveries of the 16th and 17th centuries, artists of the post-modern era seem, with one exception, more conservative. The early 20th century Avant-gardes look, in this respect, much more advanced. It will be enough to look at paintings such as those by Matisse (1943-1948), Miro´ (1959), and De Chirico (1968) to understand how slow the visual arts are in coping with the new astrophysics. Post-modernism in art begins in the late 1950s and 1960s with Joseph Cornell’s famous assembled boxes, of which I present here only one from 1957-1959 (out of many with an astronomical theme), entitled Ideals are like Stars. One can see how this kind of art reaches full maturity in the works of Anselm Kiefer from the 1970s to our very days, and in those of Kiki Smith, Ross Bleckner, and George Segal. The use of heterogeneous material in these representations of the cosmos depends on a precise technical choice, but also corresponds, I think, to the variety of matter and form we increasingly discover in the universe. The ideal purity and harmony of the past seem to be gone forever, replaced by bric-à-brac, assemblage of fragments and particles, chaos, a sense of speed and simultaneously of fall. In 1918 Marina Cvetaeva composed a poem of eight lines which can stand as an epigraph to the present account of star poetry down to the middle of the 20th century: 308 Boitani

Verses grow, like stars and roses, Like beauty–useless in a family. And, to crowns and apotheoses– One and only answer: “From where comes all this to me”? We sleep, and lo, beyond the stone slabs, The heavenly guest, in four petals. Try to understand, world!In sleep the poet discovers The law of stars and the formula of ﬂowers.

This is a pretty strong statement of the primacy of poetry. The poet does not represent or imitate the universe, he discovers it, finds out its laws–in sleep. There is, Cvetaeva seems to say, a correspondence between verses, stars, and roses, and the essence of it lies in beauty, however useless it may be. Yet the answer to all temptations of poetic triumphs is in fact a primal question: about the source of the growth of poetry, cosmos, and flowers. That origin lies in mere sleep, when the poet slumbers and a guest from heaven suddenly appears–when the rose is born. In that lethargy inspiration comes and the miracle of poetry takes place. In that lethargy the poet is the only true astronomer and the only true botanist and biologist, because he catches in a flashing moment of intuition the law of stars and the formula of flowers. John Keats had said that in reading Chapman’s Homer he had suddenly felt like Cortes´ staring at the Pacific or “like some watcher of the skies / when a new planet swims into his ken”. Aristotle had spoken of the wonder which philosophers, scientists, and poets share. The Prince of Salina, in Tomasi di Lapedusa’s The Leopard, takes refuge from the turmoil of his age, from the unbearable troubles of senescence, and from his wife, by going to his private observa- tory to look at the stars. By the end of the century, while artists continue to show the symptoms of wonder and awe, Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar sits on a Tyrrhenian beach of Southern Tuscany and tries to study the heavenly vault. He cannot really find his way among the myriad stars that glimmer up there, and concludes thus:

Per larga parte il cielo e` attraversato da striature e macchie chiare; la Via Lattea prende d’agosto una consistenza densa e si direbbe che trabocchi dal suo alveo; il chiaro e lo scuro sono cos`ı mescolati da impedire l’effetto prospettico d’un abisso nero sulla cui vuota lontananza campeggiano, ben in rilievo, le stelle; tutto resta sullo stesso piano: scintillio e nube argentea e tenebre. E` questa l’esatta geometria degli spazi siderei, cui tante volte il signor Palomar ha sentito il bisogno di rivolgersi, per staccarsi dalla Terra, luogo delle compli- cazioni superflue e delle approssimazioni confuse? Trovandosi davvero in pre- senza del cielo stellato, tutto sembra che gli sfugga... Il firmamento e` qualcosa che sta lassu`, che si vede che c’e`, ma da cui non si puo` ricavare nessuna idea di dimensioni o di distanza.

(To a large extent the sky is streaked with light stripes and patches; in August the Milky Way assumes a dense consistency and you would say it is overflowing its bed; the dark and the light are so mixed that they prevent the effect of perspective of a black abyss against whose empty remoteness the stars stand out, in relief; everything remains on the same plane: glitter and silvery cloud and shadows. Is this the exact geometry of the sidereal spaces, which Mr. Palomar has so often felt the need to turn to, in order to detach himself from the Earth, that place of superfluous complications and confused approximations? When he finds himself really in the presence of the starred sky, everything seems to escape him... The Poetry of the Stars 309

ﬁrmament is something that is up there, you can see that it exists, but from it you can derive no idea of dimensions or distance.)2

These lines could be a second epigraph to the present paper. They are a typical post- modernist statement about the impossibility of reaching any certainty. They were writ- ten only a few years before scientists heard a series of notes in B flat come from the Perseus galaxy cluster, 250 million light years from Earth. The ancient music of the spheres had finally been found. B flat is the key in which Franz Joseph Haydn’s Cre- ation, which opens in C minor, ends.

2Translation by W. Weaver. I. C, Mr. Palomar, London, Vintage Books, 1999.