Do you know any well-written poems about astronomy or star gazing?

Question

Trying to finish a poem that is half-way along. Thanks.

Answer 1

This poem by John Updike was very popular for several decades when the "solar neutrino problem" was proving very difficult to resolve. You might think it's more about physics, but neutrinos in fact play a very large role in our modern understanding of many astronomical phenomena.

Cosmic Gall
John Updike

Neutrinos they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed – you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.

Of course, our current understanding is that the solar neutrino problem was actually revealing to us that neutrinos DO have mass, albeit very small indeed. Because of this, and the fact that they are in some sense composite, the three known types of neutrinos can make transitions (regrettably known as "oscillations") between the different types. So the kind of neutrinos we receive here on Earth are NOT all of the same type that left the solar centre!

It has been suggested that John Updike should revise his famous poem to take account of this, but hey --- it was meant as an ironic poem, not as hard scientific facts. I say let it be, it's just fine as it is.

Live long and prosper.

Answer 2

Here's one I like:

The Dachshunds, by William Jay Smith
The Dachshund leads a quiet life
Not far above the ground;

He takes an elongated wife,
They travel all around.

They leave the lighted metropole;
Nor turn to look behind
Upon the headlands of the soul,
The tundras of the mind.

They climb together through the dusk
To ask the Lost-and-Found
For information on the stars
Not far above the ground.

The Dachshunds seem to journey on:
And following them, I
Take up my monocle, the Moon,
And gaze into the sky.

Pursuing them with comic art
Beyond the cosmic goal,
I see the whole within the part,
The part within the whole;

See planets wheeling overhead,
Mysterious and slow,
While morning buckles on his red,
And on the Dachshunds go.

Dogs AND the universe....Two of my favorite things in one poem. Love it!

Here's another astronomical poems:

Mother Goose's Garland
by Archibald MacLeish

Around, around the sun we go:
The moon goes round the earth.
We do not die of death:
We die of vertigo.