Outer Space: 100 Poems

Midge Goldberg

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781009203609
• eBook ISBN: 9781009203630
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Poets and astronomers often ask the same questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Throughout human history, poetry has provided stories about what people observe in the sky. Stars, planets, comets, the moon, and space travel are used as metaphors for our feelings of love, loneliness, adventurousness, and awe. This anthology includes poets, astronomers, and scientists from the 12th century BCE to today, from all around the world. Sappho, Du Fu, Hafez, and Shakespeare are joined by Gwyneth Lewis's space requiem, Tracy K. Smith on the Hubble telescope, and Charles Simic, whose poem accompanied a NASA mission. Astronomers Tycho Brahe and Edmund Halley accompany modern scientists including Rebecca Elson, Alice Gorman on the first woman in space, and Yun Wang's space journal on travel to Andromeda. This collection reaches across time and cultures to illuminate how we think about outer space, and ourselves.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Collected songs from the ballad-mistress (Unknown, Ancient Egyptian Love Songs)
• 2 Psalm 8: For the Leader; upon the Gittith. A Psalm of David
• 3 From The Iliad, Book XVIII (Homer)
• 4 Sappho 34 (Sappho)
• 5 From De rerum natura, Book 2 (Lucretius)
• 6 From Carmina, 66 (Catullus)
• 7 From Georgics, Book 4 ( Virgil)
• 8 Subhasitaratnakosha 905 (Bhāsa?)
• 9 Full Moon (Du Fu)
• 10 From “The Old English Phoenix” (Unknown, Old English)
• 11 From Inferno: Canto XXVI (Dante)
• 12 I saw the green fields of the sky … (Hafez)
• 13 From The Canterbury Tales, "The Nun’s Priest’s Tale" (Geoffrey Chaucer)
• 14 Those Who Build Houses and Temples (Unknown, Mayan)
• 15 Love the Light Giver (Michelangelo)
• 16 Urania (Tycho Brahe)
• 17 From “Epithalamion” (Edmund Spenser)
• 18 Astrophil and Stella: 31 With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies (Sir Philip Sidney)
• 19 From The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Scene 6 (Christopher Marlowe)
• 20 From Julius Caesar, Act 3 Scene 1 (William Shakespeare)
• 21 From “The Anatomy of the World” (John Donne)
• 22 Cynthia’s Revels: Queen and huntress, chaste and fair (Ben Jonson)
• 23 From Paradise Lost, Book X (John Milton)
• 24 From The Song of the Three Children, Paraphras’d (Lady Mary Chudleigh)
• 25 On the incomparable Isaac Newton (Edmund Halley)
• 26 On a Survey of the Heavens (Mercy Otis Warren)
• 27 From “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” (Anna Letitia Barbauld)
• 28 Threatening Signs (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
• 29 On Imagination (Phyllis Wheatley)
• 30 To the Evening Star (William Blake)
• 31 Sonnet to the Moon (Helen Maria Williams)
• 32 Star-gazers (William Wordsworth)
• 33 Sonnet: To the Autumnal Moon (Samuel Coleridge)
• 34 To the Moon (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
• 35 The Constellations (William Cullen Bryant)
• 36 On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (John Keats)
• 37 Winter Morning (Alexander Pushkin)
• 38 From “Song of Nature” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
• 39 From A Drama of Exile, Scene 3 (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
• 40 The Light of Stars (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
• 41 From “Al Aaraaf” (Edgar Allan Poe)
• 42 From “Timbuctoo” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
• 43 Love (Henry David Thoreau)
• 44 When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer (Walt Whitman)
• 45 Sorrows of the Moon (Charles Baudelaire)
• 46 The Philosopher and the Stars (Matthew Arnold)
• 47 A Grain of Sand (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper)
• 48 To a Star Seen at Twilight (John Rollin Ridge)
• 49 Emigravit (Helen Hunt Jackson)
• 50 The Mother Moon (Louisa May Alcott)
• 51 I Know Not What I Seek Eternally (Rosalía Castro)
• 52 The Old Astronomer (Sarah Williams)
• 53 Waiting Both (Thomas Hardy)
• 54 “— I am like a slip of comet” (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
• 55 A Solar Eclipse (Ella Wheeler Wilcox)
• 56 Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall (A. E. Housman)
• 57 Earth (Oliver Herford)
• 58 Starlight (Laurence Hope [Adela Florence Cory Nicholson])
• 59 The Cat and the Moon (William Butler Yeats)
• 60 Alfonso Churchill (Edgar Lee Masters)
• 61 To Halley’s Comet (Alice Berlingett)
• 62 A Song of a Navajo Weaver (Bertrand N. O. Walker [Hen-tah])
• 63 A Starry Night (Paul Laurence Dunbar)
• 64 The Star-Splitter (Robert Frost)
• 65 Stars (Sara Teasdale)
• 66 The Song of the Stars (Unknown, Passamaquoddy)
• 67 A Song of the Moon (Claude McKay)
• 68 From “Renascence” (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
• 69 Ballad of the Moon, Moon (Federico García Lorca)
• 70 Chant (Unknown, Dinka Nilotic Sudan)
• 71 Witnessing the Launch of the Shuttle Atlantis (Howard Nemerov)
• 72 The First Men on Mercury (Edwin Morgan)
• 73 In the Field (Richard Wilbur)
• 74 High Flight (John Gillespie Magee, Jr.)
• 75 Delay (Elizabeth Jennings)
• 76 Ladder to the Moon (X. J. Kennedy)
• 77 For My Great-Great Grandson the Space Pioneer (Rhina P. Espaillat)
• 78 Eclipse (Linda Pastan)
• 79 Galaxies (Janet Kenny)
• 80 The Ballet of the Eight-Week Kittens (Deborah Warren)
• 81 Rainy Eclipse (Leslie Monsour)
• 82 Flammarion Woodcut Pilgrim Redux (Catherine Chandler)
• 83 The Loneliest Road (Martin Elster)
• 84 The Magician’s Bashful Daughter (Alfred Nicol)
• 85 Olber’s Paradox (Robert W. Crawford)
• 86 JANUARY 22, 2003, OR THE DAY NASA SENT ITS LAST OFFICIAL SIGNAL TO PIONEER 10 (Donna Kane)
• 87 Zero Gravity: A Space Requiem (Gwyneth Lewis)
• 88 3 Nights of the Perseids (Ned Balbo)
• 89 Carnal Knowledge (Rebecca Elson)
• 90 Fermi's Paradox (John Foy)
• 91 Here now the Sun: a poem for Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space (Alice Gorman)
• 92 Space Journal: Serendipity (Yun Wang)
• 93 Sergei Krikalev on the Space Station Mir (Jay Ruzesky)
• 94 My Father's Kites (Allison Joseph)
• 95 C. E. (Bill Coyle)
• 96 On the Nearest Pass of Mars in 60,000 Years (A.E. Stallings)
• 97 Dr. Rendezvous Takes Communion on the Moon (Liz Ahl)
• 98 From “My God, It’s Full of Stars” (Tracy K. Smith)
• 99 Relativity (Sarah Howe)
• 100 Included by NASA in a July, 2021 mission to Jupiter (Charles Simic)
• Acknowledgments
• Biographies