This week’s choices take a look at the stars, which have enchanted and mystified humanity since the dawn of intelligence.
In the musical “Les Miserables”, the inflexible police officer Javert praises the stars for their unchangeable nature:
You know your place in the sky
“Stars”, Alan Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer.
You hold your course and your aim
And each in your season
Returns and returns
And is always the same
And if you fall as Lucifer fell
You fall in flames!
He sees them as an example to be followed, and this gives us an idea of his own unyielding nature. In the end, though, his certainty gives way to doubt as he realises that his quarry, the convict Valjean, has changed and perhaps never was the black villain that Javert believed him to be. Javert now sees that the cold, uncaring stars reflect his own coldness and inhumanity:
Is he from heaven or from hell?
And does he know
That granting me my life today?
This man has killed me, even soI am reaching but I fall
“Stars”, Alan Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer.
And the stars are black and cold
As I stare into the void
Of a world that cannot hold
The poems this week are all sonnets: William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 14”, William Wordsworth’s “The Stars are Mansions Built by Nature’s Hand” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Starlight Night”.
Perhaps the best performance of Javert I have seen is Philip Quast’s in the Les Mis 10th anniversary celebration.
Links
- Watch Philip Quast’s performance of Stars on YouTube.
Poem 154. Sonnet 14
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
William Shakespeare (1564—1616)
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck;
And yet methinks I have Astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself, to store thou wouldst convert;
Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.
Shakespeare apparently didn’t believe in horoscopes. The first several lines seem to gently mock the astronomer/astrologer’s (the two words were less distinct of meaning in Shakespeare’s day) readings of the heavens. He turns instead to the Fair Youth (a common subject of his early sonnets) and by looking at the stars of the Youth’s eyes predicts that truth and beauty have a future providing that the Fair Youth marries and has children (“If from thyself, to store thou wouldst convert”); failure would result in the loss of the Fair Youth’s line, which Shakespeare equates with truth and beauty perishing too.
Poem 155. The Stars are Mansions Built by Nature’s Hand
All that we see – is dome, or vault, or nest,
William Wordsworth (1770—1850)
Or fortress, reared at Nature’s sage command.
The stars are mansions built by Nature’s hand,
And, haply, there the spirits of the blest
Dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal vest;
Huge Ocean shows, within his yellow strand,
A habitation marvellously planned,
For life to occupy in love and rest;
All that we see – is dome, or vault, or nest,
Or fortress, reared at Nature’s sage command.
Glad thought for every season! but the Spring
Gave it while cares were weighing on my heart,
’Mid song of birds, and insects murmuring;
And while the youthful year’s prolific art –
Of bud, leaf, blade, and flower – was fashioning
Abodes where self-disturbance hath no part.
Wordsworth, by contrast with Shakespeare, sees the stars as the mansions of God where the spirits of the departed reside. The reflection of the heavens in the sea shows us the marvellous extent of the starry night which Wordsworth sees as the construction of a mighty designer; in the ninth line, he turns to his own cares which, though weighty, have no place amongst the springtime burgeoning of birds, bees and blossoms.
So this poem links to last week’s choice of poems too, with its evocation of the onset of Spring.
Poem 156. The Starlight Night
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844—1889)
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
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!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.
A characteristically alliterative poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, this likens the stars to the sparkling of precious metals and gems, the brightness of elves’ eyes and the whiteness of spring blossom. All this beauty is ignored—people don’t notice it in the press of their daily affairs. Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, says that we pay for these beautiful things with prayer and charity (“Prayer, patience, alms, vows”) and that the stars are the souls of Christ and his saints (hallows) shining down on us.
I like this poem because, like all Hopkins’ poems, it is beautiful, using alliteration and sprung rhythm to great effect.