Watchers of the Sky

by Alfred Noyes

In old Cathay, in far Cathay,
Before the western world began,
They saw the moving fount of day
Eclipsed, as by a shadowy fan;
They stood upon their Chinese wall.
They saw his fire to ashes fade,
And felt the deeper slumber fall
On domes of pearl and towers of jade.

With slim brown hands, in Araby,
They traced, upon the desert sand,
Their Rams and Scorpions of the sky,
And strove—and failed—to understand.
Before their footprints were effaced
The shifting sand forgot their rune;
Their hieroglyphs were all erased,
Their desert naked to the moon.

In Bagdad of the purple nights,
Haroun Al Raschid built a tower,
Where sages watched a thousand lights
And read their legends, for an hour.
The tower is down, the Caliph dead,
Their astrolabes are wrecked with rust.
Orion glitters overhead,
Aladdin's lamp is in the dust.

In Babylon, in Babylon,
They baked their tablets of the clay;
And, year by year, inscribed thereon
The dark eclipses of their day;
They saw the moving finger write
Its Mene, Mene, on their sun.
A mightier shadow cloaks their light,
And clay is clay in Babylon.

A shadow moved towards him from the door.
Copernicus, with a cry, upraised his head.
"The book, I cannot see it, let me feel
The lettering on the cover.
It is here!
Put out the lamp, now. Draw those curtains back,
And let me die with starlight on my face.
An angel's hand in mine . . . yes; I can say
My nunc dimittis now . . . light, and more light
In that pure realm whose darkness is our peace."

II

TYCHO BRAHE

I

They thought him a magician, Tycho Brahe,
Who lived on that strange island in the Sound,
Nine miles from Elsinore.
His legend reached
The Mermaid Inn the year that Shakespeare died.
Fynes Moryson had brought his travellers' tales
Of Wheen, the heart-shaped isle where Tycho made
His great discoveries, and, with Jeppe, his dwarf,
And flaxen-haired Christine, the peasant girl,
Dreamed his great dreams for five-and-twenty years.
For there he lit that lanthorn of the law,
Uraniborg; that fortress of the truth,
With Pegasus flying above its loftiest tower,
While, in its roofs, like wide enchanted eyes
Watching, the brightest windows in the world,
Opened upon the stars.

Nine miles from Elsinore, with all those ghosts,
There's magic enough in that! But white-cliffed Wheen,
Six miles in girth, with crowds of hunchback waves
Crawling all round it, and those moonstruck windows,
Held its own magic, too; for Tycho Brahe
By his mysterious alchemy of dreams
Had so enriched the soil, that when the king
Of England wished to buy it, Denmark asked
A price too great for any king on earth.
"Give us," they said, "in scarlet cardinal's cloth
Enough to cover it, and, at every corner,
Of every piece, a right rose-noble too;
Then all that kings can buy of Wheen is yours.
Only," said they, "a merchant bought it once;
And, when he came to claim it, goblins flocked
All round him, from its forty goblin farms,
And mocked him, bidding him take away the stones
That he had bought, for nothing else was his."
These things were fables. They were also true.
They thought him a magician, Tycho Brahe,
The astrologer, who wore the mask of gold.
Perhaps he was. There's magic in the truth;
And only those who find and follow its laws
Can work its miracles.
Tycho sought the truth
From that strange year in boyhood when he heard
The great eclipse foretold; and, on the day
Appointed, at the very minute even,
Beheld the weirdly punctual shadow creep
Across the sun, bewildering all the birds
With thoughts of evening.
Picture him, on that day,
The boy at Copenhagen, with his mane
Of thick red hair, thrusting his freckled face
Out of his upper window, holding the piece
Of glass he blackened above his candle-flame
To watch that orange ember in the sky
Wane into smouldering ash.
He whispered there,
"So it is true. By searching in the heavens,
Men can foretell the future."
In the street
Below him, throngs were babbling of the plague
That might or might not follow.
He resolved
To make himself the master of that deep art
And know what might be known.
He bought the books
Of Stadius, with his tables of the stars.
Night after night, among the gabled roofs,
Climbing and creeping through a world unknown
Save to the roosting stork, he learned to find
The constellations, Cassiopeia's throne,
The Plough still pointing to the Polar Star,
The sword-belt of Orion. There he watched
The movements of the planets, hours on hours,
And wondered at the mystery of it all.
All this he did in secret, for his birth
Was noble, and such wonderings were a sign
Of low estate, when Tycho Brahe was young;
And all his kinsmen hoped that Tycho Brahe
Would live, serene as they, among his dogs
And horses; or, if honour must be won,
Let the superfluous glory flow from fields
Where blood might still be shed; or from those courts
Where statesmen lie. But Tycho sought the truth.
So, when they sent him in his tutor's charge
To Leipzig, for such studies as they held
More worthy of his princely blood, he searched
The Almagest; and, while his tutor slept,
Measured the delicate angles of the stars,
Out of his window, with his compasses,
His only instrument. Even with this rude aid
He found so many an ancient record wrong
That more and more he burned to find the truth.