Watchers of the Sky | Page 2

idea, and their stories told in
a combination of narrative and lyrical verse. "The Torch-Bearers"
flowed all the more naturally into a similar form in view of the fact that
Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and many other pioneers of science wrote a
considerable number of poems. Those imbedded in the works of
Kepler--whose blazing and fantastic genius was, indeed, primarily
poetic--are of extraordinary interest. I was helped, too, in the general
scheme by those constant meetings between science and poetry, of
which the most famous and beautiful are the visit of Sir Henry Wotton
to Kepler, and the visit of Milton to Galileo in prison.

Even if science and poetry were as deadly opposites as the shallow
often affirm, the method and scheme indicated above would at least
make it possible to convey something of the splendour of the long
battle for the light in its most human aspect. Poetry has its own
precision of expression and, in modern times, it has been seeking more
and more for truth, sometimes even at the expense of beauty. It may be
possible to carry that quest a stage farther, to the point where, in the
great rhythmical laws of the universe revealed by science, truth and
beauty are reunited. If poetry can do this, it will not be without some
value to science itself, and it will be playing its part in the
reconstruction of a shattered world. The passing of the old order of
dogmatic religion has left the modern world in a strange chaos, craving
for something in which it can unfeignedly believe, and often following
will-o'-the-wisps. Forty years ago, Matthew Arnold prophesied that it
would be for poetry, "where it is worthy of its high destinies," to help
to carry on the purer fire, and to express in new terms those eternal
ideas which must ever be the only sure stay of the human race. It is not
within the province of science to attempt a post-Copernican
justification of the ways of God to man; but, in the laws of nature
revealed by science, and in "that grand sequence of events which"--as
Darwin affirmed--"the mind refuses to accept as the result of blind
chance," poetry may discover its own new grounds for the attempt. It is
easy to assume that all hope and faith are shallow. It is even easier to
practise a really shallow and devitalising pessimism. The modern
annunciation that there is a skeleton an inch beneath the skin of man is
neither new nor profound. Neither science nor poetry can rest there;
and if, in this poem, an attempt is made to show that spiritual values are
not diminished or overwhelmed by the "fifteen hundred universes" that
passed in review before the telescope of Herschel, it is only after the
opposite argument--so common and so easy to-day--has been faced;
and only after poetry has at least endeavoured to follow the torch of
science to its own deep-set boundary-mark in that immense darkness of
Space and Time.
CONTENTS
Prologue

I. Copernicus
II. Tycho Brahe
III. Kepler
IV. Galileo
V. Newton
VI. William Herschel Conducts
VII. Sir John Herschel Remembers
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
THE OBSERVATORY
At noon, upon the mountain's purple height,
Above the pine-woods
and the clouds it shone
No larger than the small white dome of shell

Left by the fledgling wren when wings are born.
By night it joined
the company of heaven,
And, with its constant light, became a star.

A needle-point of light, minute, remote,
It sent a subtler message
through the abyss,
Held more significance for the seeing eye
Than
all the darkness that would blot it out,
Yet could not dwarf it.
High in heaven it shone,
Alive with all the thoughts, and hopes, and
dreams
Of man's adventurous mind.
Up there, I knew
The explorers of the sky, the pioneers
Of science,
now made ready to attack
That darkness once again, and win new
worlds.
To-morrow night they hoped to crown the toil
Of twenty
years, and turn upon the sky
The noblest weapon ever made by man.

War had delayed them. They had been drawn away
Designing
darker weapons. But no gun
Could outrange this.

"To-morrow night"--so wrote their chief--"we try
Our great new
telescope, the hundred-inch.
Your Milton's 'optic tube' has grown in
power
Since Galileo, famous, blind, and old,
Talked with him, in
that prison, of the sky.
We creep to power by inches. Europe trusts

Her 'giant forty' still. Even to-night
Our own old sixty has its work to
do;
And now our hundred-inch . . . I hardly dare
To think what this
new muzzle of ours may find.
Come up, and spend that night among
the stars
Here, on our mountain-top. If all goes well,
Then, at the
least, my friend, you'll see a moon
Stranger, but nearer, many a
thousand mile
Than earth has ever seen her, even in dreams.
As for
the stars, if seeing them were all,
Three thousand million new-found
points of light
Is our rough guess. But never speak of this.
You
know