Watchers of the Sky

by Alfred Noyes

You were a great magician, Tycho Brahe;
And, now that they have driven you away,
I, that am only Jeppe,—the crooked dwarf,
You used to laugh at for his matted hair,
And head too big and heavy—take your pen
Here in your study. I will write it down
And send it by a sailor to the King
Of Scotland, and who knows, the mouse that gnawed
The lion free, may save you, Tycho Brahe.'"
"He is free now," said Kepler, "had he lived
He would have sent for Jeppe to join him there
At Prague. But death forestalled him, and your King.
The years in which he watched that planet Mars,
His patient notes and records, all were mine;
And, mark you, had he clipped or trimmed one fact
By even a hair's-breadth, so that his results
Made a pure circle of that planet's path
It might have baffled us for an age and drowned
All our new light in darkness. But he held
To what he saw. He might so easily,
So comfortably have said, 'My instruments
Are crude and fallible. In so fine a point
Eyes may have erred, too. Why not acquiesce?
Why mar the tune, why dislocate a world,
For one slight clash of seeming fact with faith?'
But no, though stars might swerve, he held his course,
Recording only what his eyes could see
Until death closed them.
Then, to his results,
I added mine and saw, in one wild gleam,
Strange as the light of day to one born blind,
A subtler concord ruling them and heard
Profounder tones of harmony resolve
Those broken melodies into song again."—
"Faintly and far away, I, too, have seen
In music, and in verse, that golden clue
Whereof you speak," said Wotton. "In all true song,
There is a hidden logic. Even the rhyme
That, in bad poets, wrings the neck of thought,
Is like a subtle calculus to the true,
An instrument of discovery. It reveals
New harmonies, new analogies. It links
Far things and near, not in unnatural chains,
But in those true accords which still escape
The plodding reason, yet unify the world.
I caught some glimpses of this mystic power
In verses of your own, that elegy
On Tycho, and that great quatrain of yours—
I cannot quite recall the Latin words,
But made it roughly mine in words like these:

'I know that I am dust, and daily die;
Yet, as I trace those rhythmic spheres at night,
I stand before the Thunderer's throne on high
And feast on nectar in the halls of light.'

My version lacks the glory of your lines
But…"
"Mine too was a version,"
Kepler laughed,
"Turned into Latin from old Ptolemy's Greek;
For, even in verse, half of the joy, I think,
Is just to pass the torch from hand to hand
An undimmed splendour. But, last night, I tried
Some music all my own. I had a dream
That I was wandering in some distant world.
I have often dreamed it Once it was the moon.
I wrote that down in prose. When I am dead,
It may be printed. This was a fairer dream:
For I was walking in a far-off spring
Upon the planet, Venus. Only verse
Could spread true wings for that delicious world;
And so I wrote it—for no eyes but mine,
Or 'twould be seized on, doubtless, as fresh proof
Of poor old Kepler's madness."—
"Let me hear,
Madman to madman; for I, too, write verse."
Then Kepler, in a rhythmic murmur, breathed
His rich enchanted memories of that dream:

"Beauty burned before me
Swinging a lanthorn through that fragrant night.
I followed a distant singing,
And a dreaming light
How she led me, I cannot tell
To that strange world afar,
Nor how I walked, in that wild glen
Upon the sunset star.

Winged creatures floated
Under those rose-red boughs of violet bloom,
With delicate forms unknown on Earth
'Twixt irised plume and plume;
Human-hearted, angel-eyed,
And crowned with unknown flowers;
For nothing in that enchanted world
Followed the way of ours.

Only I saw that Beauty,
On Hesper, as on earth, still held command;
And though, as one in slumber,
I roamed that radiant land,
With all these earth-born senses sealed
To what the Hesperians knew,
The faithful lanthorn of her law
Was mine on Hesper too.

Then, half at home with wonder,
I saw strange flocks of flowers like birds take flight;
Great trees that burned like opals
To lure their loves at night;
Dark beings that could move in realms
No dream of ours has known.
Till these became as common things
As men account their own.

Yet, when that lanthorn led me
Back to the world where once I thought me wise;
I saw, on this my planet,
What souls, with awful eyes.
Hardly I dared to walk her fields
As in that strange re-birth
I looked on those wild miracles
The birds and flowers of earth."

Silence a moment held them, loth to break
The spell of that strange dream,
"One proof the more"
Said Wotton at last, "that songs can mount and fly
To truth; for this fantastic vision of yours
Of life in other spheres, awakes in me,
Either that slumbering knowledge of Socrates,
Or some strange premonition that the years
Will prove it true. This music leads us far
From all our creeds, except that faith in law.
Your quest for knowledge—how it rests on that!
How sure the soul is that if truth destroy
The temple, in three days the truth will build
A nobler temple; and that order reigns
In all things. Even your atheist builds his doubt
On that strange faith; destroys his heaven and God
In absolute faith that his own thought is true
To law, God's lanthorn to our stumbling feet;
And so, despite himself, he worships God,
For where true souls are, there are God and heaven."—

"It is an ancient wisdom. Long ago,"
Said Kepler, "under the glittering Eastern sky,
The shepherd king looked up at those great stars,
Those ordered hosts, and cried Caeli narrant
Gloriam Dei!
Though there be some to-day
Who'd ape Lucretius, and believe themselves
Epicureans, little they know of him
Who, even in utter darkness, bowed his head,
To something nobler than the gods of Rome
Reigning beyond the darkness.
They accept
The law, the music of these ordered worlds;
And straight deny the law's first postulate,
That out of nothingness nothing can be born,
Nor greater things from less. Can music rise
By chance from chaos, as they said that star
In Serpentarius rose? I told them, then,
That when I was a boy, with time to spare,
I played at anagrams. Out of my Latin name
Johannes Keplerus came that sinister phrase
Serpens in akuleo. Struck by this,
I tried again, but trusted it to chance.
I took some playing cards, and wrote on each
One letter of my name. Then I began
To shuffle them; and, at every shuffle, I read
The letters, in their order, as they came,
To see what meaning chance might give to them.
Wotton, the gods and goddesses must have laughed
To see the weeks I lost in studying chance;
For had I scattered those cards into the black
Epicurean eternity, I'll swear
They'd still be playing at leap-frog in the dark,
And show no glimmer of sense. And yet—to hear
Those wittols talk, you'd think you'd but to mix
A bushel of good Greek letters in a sack
And shake them roundly for an age or so,
To pour the Odyssey out.
At last, I told,
Those disputants what my wife had said. One night
When I was tired and all my mind a-dust
With pondering on their atoms, I was called
To supper, and she placed before me there
A most delicious salad. 'It would appear,'
I thought aloud, 'that if these pewter dishes,
Green hearts of lettuce, tarragon, slips of thyme,
Slices of hard boiled egg, and grains of salt.
With drops of water, vinegar and oil,
Had in a bottomless gulf been flying about
From all eternity, one sure certain day
The sweet invisible hand of Happy Chance
Would serve them as a salad.'
'Likely enough,'
My wife replied, 'but not so good as mine,
Nor so well dressed.'"
They laughed. Susannah's voice
Broke in, "I've made a better one. The receipt
Came from the Golden Lion. I have dished
Ducklings and peas and all. Come, John, say grace."