Do you know any poems about astronomy or star gazing?

Question

Just looking for some ideas to finish a poem that is half-way done. Thanks.

Answer 1

John Donne's 'Valediction: Forbidding Mourning' is all about an astronomical conceit, or device to join similes and metaphors in a poem. Granted, it's more planetary than astral, but here you go:

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

http://www.baltastro.org/AstroPoetry.html is a link of other poems on the same, including the previously mentioned Whitman work. I'm also partial to the Sara Teasdale on there.

Answer 2

There is a book called 'the little prince' which isn't exactly about astronomy but it does involve a boy living on an asteroid and the philosophy of the book is certaintly poetic, so maybe check it out. I think you can read it online, free, google books i think. the author has a complicated french name i cant remember, but if inspiration is what you need, check it out.

Answer 3

Walt Whitman, "The Learned Astronomer." It's quite short.

Answer 4

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