Watchers of the Sky

by Alfred Noyes

He saw her seized at last by that same fire,
Burning to help, a sleepless Vestal, dowered
With lightning-quickness, rushing from desk to clock,
Or measuring distances at dead of night
Between the lamp-micrometer and his eyes.

He saw her in mid-winter, hurrying out,
A slim shawled figure through the drifted snow,
To help him; saw her fall with a stifled cry,
Gashing herself upon that buried hook,
And struggling up, out of the blood-stained drift,
To greet him with a smile.
"For any soldier,
This wound," the surgeon muttered, "would have meant
Six weeks in hospital."
Not six days for her!
"I am glad these nights were cloudy, and we lost
So little," was all she said.
Sir John pulled out
Another stop. A little ironical march
Of flutes began to goose-step through the gloom.
He saw that first "success"! Ay, call it so!
The royal command,—the court desires to see
The planet Saturn and his marvellous rings
On Friday night. The skies, on Friday night,
Were black with clouds. "Canute me no Canutes,"
Muttered their new magician, and unpacked
His telescope. "You shall see what you can see."
He levelled it through a window; and they saw
"Wonderful! Marvellous! Glorious! Eh, what, what!"
A planet of paper, with a paper ring,
Lit by a lamp, in a hollow of Windsor Park,
Among the ferns, where Herne the Hunter walks,
And Falstaff found that fairies live on cheese.
Thus all were satisfied; while, above the clouds—
The thunder of the pedals reaffirmed—
The Titan planet, every minute, rolled
Three hundred leagues upon his awful way.
Then, through that night, the _vox humana_spoke
With deeper longing than Lucretius knew
When, in his great third book, the somber chant
Kindled and soared on those exultant wings,
Praising the master's hand from which he, too,
—Father, discoverer, hero—caught the fire.
It spoke of those vast labours, incomplete,
But, through their incompletion, infinite
In beauty, and in hope; the task bequeathed
From dying hand to hand.
Close to his grave
Like a memento mori stood the hulk
Of that great weapon rusted and outworn,
Which once broke down the barriers of the sky.
"Perrupit claustra"; yes, and bridged their gulfs;
For, far beyond our solar scheme, it showed
The law that bound our planets binding still
Those coupled suns which year by year he watched
Around each other circling.
Had our own
Some distant comrade, lost among the stars?
Should we not, one day, just as Kepler drew
His planetary music and its laws
From all those faithful records Tycho made,
Discern at last what vaster music rules
The vaster drift of stars from deep to deep;
Around what awful Poles, those wisps of light
Those fifteen hundred universes move?
One signal, even now, across the dark,
Declared their worlds confederate with our own;
For, carrying many secrets, which we now
Slowly decipher, one swift messenger comes
Across the abyss…
The light that, flashing through the immeasurable,
From universe to universe proclaims
The single reign of law that binds them all.
We shall break up those rays and, in their lines
And colours, read the history of their stars.
Year after year, the slow sure records grow.
Awaiting their interpreter. They shall see it,
Our sons, in that far day, the swift, the strong,
The triumphing young-eyed runners with the torch.

No deep-set boundary-mark in Space or Time
Shall halt or daunt them. Who that once has seen
How truth leads on to truth, shall ever dare
To set a bound to knowledge?
"Would that he knew"
—So thought the visitant at that shadowy shrine—
"Even as the maker of a song can hear
With the soul's ear, far off, the unstricken chords
To which, by its own inner law, it climbs,
Would that my father knew how younger hands
Completed his own planetary tune;
How from the planet that his own eyes found
The mind of man would plunge into the dark,
And, blindfold, find without the help of eyes
A mightier planet, in the depths beyond."

Then, while the reeds, with quiet melodious pace
Followed the dream, as in a picture passed,
Adams, the boy at Cambridge, making his vow
By that still lamp, alone in that deep night,
Beneath the crumbling battlements of St. John's,
To know why Uranus, uttermost planet known,
Moved in a rhythm delicately astray
From all the golden harmonies ordained
By those known measures of its sister-worlds.
Was there an unknown planet, far beyond,
Sailing through unimaginable deeps
And drawing it from its path?
Then challenging chords
Echoed the prophecy that Sir John had made,
Guided by his own faith in Newton's law:
We have not found it, but we feel it trembling
Along the lines of our analysis now
As once Columbus, from the shores of Spain,
Felt the new continent.
Then, in swift fugues, began
A race between two nations for the prize
Of that new world.
Le Verrier in France,
Adams in England, each of them unaware
Of his own rival, at the selfsame hour
Resolved to find it.
Not by the telescope now!
Skies might be swept for aeons ere one spark
Among those myriads were both found and seen
To move, at that vast distance round our sun.
They worked by faith in law alone. They knew
The wanderings of great Uranus, and they knew
The law of Newton.
By the midnight lamp,
Pencil in hand, shut in a four-walled room,
Each by pure thought must work his problem out,—
Given that law, to find the mass and place
Of that which drew their planet from his course.

There were no throngs to applaud them. Each alone,
Without the heat of conflict laboured on,
Consuming brain and nerve; for throngs applaud
Only the flash and tinsel of their day,
Never the quiet runners with the torch.
Night after night they laboured. Line on line
Of intricate figures, moving all in law,
They marshalled. Their long columns formed and marched
From battle to battle, and no sound was heard
Of victory or defeat. They marched through snows
Bleak as the drifts that broke Napoleon's pride
And through a vaster desert. They drilled their hosts
With that divine precision of the mind
To which one second's error in a year
Were anarchy, that precision which is felt
Throbbing through music.
Month on month they toiled,
With worlds for ciphers. One rich autumn night
Brooding over his figures there alone
In Cambridge, Adams found them moving all
To one solution. To the unseeing eye
His long neat pages had no more to tell
Than any merchant's ledger, yet they shone
With epic splendour, and like trumpets pealed;
Three hundred million leagues beyond the path
Of our remotest planet, drowned in night
Another and a mightier planet rolls;
In volume, fifty times more vast than earth,
And of so huge an orbit that its year
Wellnigh outlasts our nations. Though it moves
A thousand leagues an hour, it has not ranged
Thrice through its seasons since Columbus sailed,
Or more than once since Galileo died.

He took his proofs to Greenwich. "Sweep the skies
Within this limited region now," he said.
"You'll find your moving planet. I'm not more
Than one degree in error."
He left his proofs;
But Airy, king of Greenwich, looked askance
At unofficial genius in the young,
And pigeon-holed that music of the spheres.
Nine months he waited till Le Verrier, too,
Pointed to that same region of the sky.
Then Airy, opening his big sleepy lids,
Bade Challis use his telescope,—too late,
To make that honour all his country's own;
For all Le Verrier's proofs were now with Galle
Who, being German, had his star-charts ready
And, in that region, found one needlepoint
Had moved. A monster planet!
Honour to France!
Honour to England, too, the cry began,
Who found it also, though she drowsed at Greenwich.
So—as the French said, with some sting in it—
"We gave the name of Neptune to our prize
Because our neighbour England rules the sea."
"Honour to all," say we; for, in these wars,
Whoever wins a battle wins for all.
But, most of all, honour to him who found
The law that was a lantern to their feet,—
Newton, the first whose thought could soar beyond
The bounds of human vision and declare,
"Thus saith the law of Nature and of God
Concerning things invisible."
This new world
What was it but one harmony the more
In that great music which himself had heard,—
The chant of those reintegrated spheres
Moving around their sun, while all things moved
Around one deeper Light, revealed by law,
Beyond all vision, past all understanding.
Yet darkly shadowed forth for dreaming men
On earth in music…
Music, all comes back
To music in the end.
Then, in the gloom
Of the Octagon Chapel, the dreamer lifted up
His face, as if to all those great forebears.
The quivering organ rolled upon the dusk
His dream of that new symphony,—the sun
Chanting to all his planets on their way
While, stop to stop replying, height o'er height,
His planets answered, voices of a dream:

THE SUN

Light, on the far faint planets that attend me!
Light! But for me-the fury and the fire.
My white-hot maelstroms, the red storms that rend me
Can yield them still the harvest they desire,

I kiss with light their sunward-lifted faces.
With dew-drenched flowers I crown their dusky brows.
They praise me, lightly, from their pleasant places.
Their birds belaud me, lightly, from their boughs.

And men, on lute and lyre, have breathed their pleasure.
They have watched Apollo's golden chariot roll;
Hymned his bright wheels, but never mine that measure
A million leagues of flame from Pole to Pole.