Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 82:325 (Jan 1925)
Article: The Poetry Of Astronomy I
Author: C. Norman Bartlett

BSac 81:325 (Jan 1925) p. 13

The Poetry Of Astronomy I

C. Norman Bartlett

Ps. 19:1

Is there anything in nature so wonderful as the starlit heavens For ages men have been lured by the stars. In awed wonder they have viewed the splendor of the sky and sought to unlock its mysteries. While the ancients studied the stars with eager interest and made discoveries of great value, they had little conception of the true nature and size of the universe. Yet their ludicrously erroneous and inadequate ideas gave birth to many beautiful poems.

Modern astronomy is revealing an ever larger universe. Compared with the sun our earth is like a small pea beside a globe two feet in diameter. Every second the sun pours forth an amount of heat equal to that produced by 11,000 trillion tons of coal. It is generally estimated by astronomers that there are in our stellar universe two or three thousand million stars, many of them hundreds of times brighter and thousands of times larger than our sun. Antares, the biggest star ever measured, is found to be 400,000,000 miles in diameter. Even more appalling are the immense distances of the stars. The distance of the sun from the earth, 93,000,000 miles, compared to that of the nearest star is as one foot to fifty miles. Employing as a unit of measurement the distance covered in a year by light travelling 186,000 miles a second, we learn that the North Star is 73 light years away, the stars in the Milky Way are at least 20,000 light years distant, while some of the star clusters are probably hundreds of thousands of light years removed from us. We dwell in a sizable universe. The imagination reels as it seeks to comprehend its vastness.

Many poems of the order of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little

BSac 81:325 (Jan 1925) p. 14

Star,” have been based upon the appearance of the stars rather than upon astronomical facts. Has the astronomy that has revealed such an immeasurably vaster universe and dissipated so many lovely illusions drained the stars of poetry? I think not. There is no reason why fancy should be frost-bitten by science. Rather does expanding knowledge open up new realms of mystery where the imagination may soar to greater altitudes among the fields of infinity and draw truths from stars as bees extract honey from flowers. From a bigger astronomy we should reap richer harvests of poetry.

For a number of years I have been deeply interested in astronomy in a non-technical way; and have sought to keep abreast of the latest discoveries in the field, so far as it has been possible for me to do so for whom mathematics have possessed all the alluring charms of a pedestrian tour across the Sahara Desert. Every new fact has come to...