Watchers of the Sky

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Watchers of the Sky, by Alfred Noyes
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Title: Watchers of the Sky
Author: Alfred Noyes
Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6574]
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WATCHERS

OF THE SKY ***
Produced by Beth L. Constantine, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE TORCH-BEARERS
WATCHERS OF THE SKY
BY
ALFRED NOYES
PREFATORY NOTE
This volume, while it is complete in itself, is also the first of a trilogy,
the scope of which is suggested in the prologue. The story of scientific
discovery has its own epic unity--a unity of purpose and endeavour--the
single torch passing from hand to hand through the centuries; and the
great moments of science when, after long labour, the pioneers saw
their accumulated facts falling into a significant order--sometimes in
the form of a law that revolutionised the whole world of thought--have
an intense human interest, and belong essentially to the creative
imagination of poetry. It is with these moments that my poem is chiefly
concerned, not with any impossible attempt to cover the whole field or
to make a new poetic system, after the Lucretian model, out of modern
science.
The theme has been in my mind for a good many years; and the first
volume, dealing with the "Watchers of the Sky," began to take definite
shape during what was to me an unforgettable experience--the night I
was privileged to spend on a summit of the Sierra Madre Mountains,
when the first trial was made of the new 100-inch telescope. The
prologue to this volume attempts to give a picture of that night, and to
elucidate my own purpose.
The first tale in this volume plunges into the middle of things, with the
revolution brought about by Copernicus; but, within the tale, partly by
means of an incidental lyric, there is an attempt to give a bird's-eye

view of what had gone before. The torch then passes to Tycho Brahe,
who, driven into exile with his tables of the stars, at the very point of
death hands them over to a young man named Kepler. Kepler, with
their help, arrives at his own great laws, and corresponds with
Galileo--the intensely human drama of whose life I have endeavoured
to depict with more historical accuracy than can be attributed to much
of the poetic literature that has gathered around his name. Too many
writers have succumbed to the temptation of the cry, "e pur si muove!"
It is, of course, rejected by every reliable historian, and was first
attributed to Galileo a hundred years after his death. M. Ponsard, in his
play on the subject, succumbed to the extent of making his final scene
end with Galileo "frappant du pied la terre," and crying, "pourtant elle
tourne." Galileo's recantation was a far more subtle and tragically
complicated affair than that. Even Landor succumbed to the easy
method of making him display his entirely legendary scars to Milton. If
these familiar pictures are not to be found in my poem, it may be well
for me to assure the hasty reader that it is because I have endeavoured
to present a more just picture. I have tried to suggest the complications
of motive in this section by a series of letters passing between the
characters chiefly concerned. There was, of course, a certain poetic
significance in the legend of "e pur si muove"; and this significance I
have endeavoured to retain without violating historical truth.
In the year of Galileo's death Newton was born, and the subsequent
sections carry the story on to the modern observatory again. The form I
have adopted is a development from that of an earlier book, "Tales of
the Mermaid Tavern" where certain poets and
discoverers of another
kind were brought together round a central