Objects carry their history and our own -
A drum let’s say, which traversed the Atlantic
Or a telescope longue vue,
Piercing the concavity
Of the starlit underglobe
Exposing deep space said Herschel
And splintered rigid icons of belief.
Old truths became myths,
New truths spawned new poetry.
Herschel thought the moon had forests
And shadows meant mountains
On which like Moses on Mount Pisgah
Surveying the land of Judah,
Even unto the utmost sea,
He might perch to admire
The blue wonders of the Earth.
Driven to sweep and plot the sky,
With small adoring sister Caroline,
He laboured through cold nights,
Reading the sky like a music score,
Uncovering, discomposing myth,
To find the polar star’s duality,
And glories of the smoky clouds
Of stars within Andromeda.
They sought new galaxies impelled
To find some Spindle of Necessity
First spun by Plato, Aristarchus,
Not by Three Fates but Fate,
Fingering a newer music,
Beyond the old dome where now
No angels sang nor flew.
The refractory lens of Galileo
Led to this and Newton,
Whose reflexive concentration
Focused understanding
Of a truth we stood within,
And watched Illumined under.
Enlightened without and lit within
In space and time {which Time he
Knew not yet must have a stop}
Herschel built a lens of longer views
Of what the old Greeks had thought before
Of our old concave metaphor.
©Terry Hodgson2020
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