free-verse446 lines

Kepler

by Alfred Noyes

John Kepler, from the chimney corner, watched

His wife Susannah, with her sleeves rolled back

Making a salad in a big blue bowl.

The thick tufts of his black rebellious hair

Brushed into sleek submission; his trim beard

Snug as the soft round body of a thrush

Between the white wings of his fan-shaped ruff

(His best, with the fine lace border) spoke of guests

Expected; and his quick grey humorous eyes,

His firm red whimsical pleasure-loving mouth,

And all those elvish twinklings of his face,

Were lit with eagerness. Only between his brows,

Perplexed beneath that subtle load of dreams,

Two delicate shadows brooded.

"What does it mean?

Sir Henry Wotton's letter breathed a hint

That Italy is prohibiting my book,"

He muttered. "Then, if Austria damns it too,

Susannah mine, we may be forced to choose

Between the truth and exile. When he comes,

He'll tell me more. Ambassadors, I suppose,

Can only write in cipher, while our world

Is steered to heaven by murderers and thieves;

But, if he'd wrapped his friendly warnings up

In a verse or two, I might have done more work

These last three days, eh, Sue?"

"Look, John," said she,

"What beautiful hearts of lettuce! Tell me now

How shall I mix it? Will your English guest

Turn up his nose at dandelion leaves

As crisp and young as these? They've just the tang

Of bitterness in their milk that gives a relish

And makes all sweet; and that's philosophy, John.

Now--these spring onions! Would his Excellency

Like sugared rose-leaves better?"

"He's a poet,

Not an ambassador only, so I think

He'll like a cottage salad."

"A poet, John!

I hate their arrogant little insect ways!

I'll put a toadstool in."

"Poets, dear heart,

Can be divided into two clear kinds,--

One that, by virtue of a half-grown brain,

Lives in a silly world of his own making,

A bubble, blown by himself, in which he flits

And dizzily bombinates, chanting 'I, I, I,'

For there is nothing in the heavens above

Or the earth, or hell beneath, but goes to swell

His personal pronoun. Bring him some dreadful news

His dearest friend is burned to death,--You'll see

The monstrous insect strike an attitude

And shape himself into one capital I,

A rubric, with red eyes. You'll see him use

The coffin for his pedestal, hear him mouth

His 'I, I, I' instructing haggard grief

Concerning his odd ego. Does he chirp

Of love, it's 'I, I, I' Narcissus, love,

Myself, Narcissus, imaged in those eyes;

For all the love-notes that he sounds are made

After the fashion of passionate grasshoppers,

By grating one hind-leg across another.

Nor does he learn to sound that mellower 'You,'

Until his bubble bursts and leaves him drowned,

An insect in a soap-sud.

But there's another kind, whose mind still moves

In vital concord with the soul of things;

So that it thinks in music, and its thoughts

Pulse into natural song. A separate voice,

And yet caught up by the surrounding choirs,

There, in the harmonies of the Universe,

Losing himself, he saves his soul alive."

"John, I'm afraid!"--

"Afraid of what, Susannah?"--

"Afraid to put those Ducklings on to roast.

Your friend may miss his road; and, if he's late,

My little part of the music will be spoiled."--

"He won't, Susannah. Bad poets are always late.

Good poets, at times, delay a note or two;

But all the great are punctual as the sun.

What's that? He's early! That's his knock, I think!"--

"The Lord have mercy, John, there's nothing ready!

Take him into your study and talk to him,

Talk hard. He's come an hour before his time;

And I've to change my dress. I'll into the kitchen!"

Then, in a moment, all the cottage rang

With greetings; hand grasped hand; his Excellency

Forgot the careful prologue he'd prepared,

And made an end of mystery. He had brought

A message from his wisdom-loving king

Who, hearing of new menaces to the light

In Europe, urged the illustrious Kepler now

To make his home in England. There, his thought

And speech would both be free.

"My friend," said Wotton,

"I have moved in those old strongholds of the night,

And heard strange mutterings. It is not many years

Since Bruno burned. There's trouble brewing too,

For one you know, I think,--the Florentine

Who made that curious optic tube."--

"You mean

The man at Padua, Galileo?"--

"Yes."

"They will not dare or need. Proof or disproof

Rests with their eyes."--

"Kepler, have you not heard

Of those who, fifteen hundred years ago,

Had eyes and would not see? Eyes quickly close

When souls prefer the dark."--

"So be it. Other and younger eyes will see.

Perhaps that's why God gave the young a spice

Of devilry. They'll go look, while elders gasp;

And, when the Devil and Truth go hand in hand,

God help their enemies. You will send my thanks,

My grateful thanks, Sir Henry, to your king.

To-day I cannot answer you. I must think.

It would be very difficult My wife

Would find it hard to leave her native land.

Say nothing yet before her."

Then, to hide

Their secret from Susannah, Kepler poured

His mind out, and the world's dead branches bloomed.

For, when he talked, another spring began

To which our May was winter; and, in the boughs

Of his delicious thoughts, like feathered choirs,

Bits of old rhyme, scraps from the Sabine farm,

Celestial phrases from the Shepherd King,

And fluttering morsels from Catullus sang.

Much was fantastic. All was touched with light

That only genius knows to steal from heaven.

He spoke of poetry, as the "flowering time

Of knowledge," called it "thought in passionate tune

With those great rhythms that steer the moon and sun;

Thought in such concord with the soul of things

That it can only move, like tides and stars,

And man's own beating heart, and the wings of birds,

In law, whose service only sets them free."

Therefore it often leaps to the truth we seek,

Clasping it, as a lover clasps his bride

In darkness, ere the sage can light his lamp.

And so, in music, men might find the road

To truth, at many a point, where sages grope.

One day, a greater Plato would arise

To write a new philosophy, he said,

Showing how music is the golden clue

To all the windings of the world's dark maze.

Himself had used it, partly proved it, too,

In his own book,--the Harmonies of the World.

'All that the years discover points one way

To this great ordered harmony," he said,

"Revealed on earth by music. Planets move

In subtle accord like notes of one great song

Audible only to the Artificer,

The Eternal Artist. There's no grief, no pain,

But music--follow it simply as a clue,

A microcosmic pattern of the whole--

Can show you, somewhere in its golden scheme,

The use of all such discords; and, at last,

Their exquisite solution. Then darkness breaks

Into diviner light, love's agony climbs

Through death to life, and evil builds up heaven.

Have you not heard, in some great symphony,

Those golden mathematics making clear

The victory of the soul? Have you not heard

The very heavens opening?

Do those fools

Who thought me an infidel then, still smile at me

For trying to read the stars in terms of song,

Discern their orbits, measure their distances,

By musical proportions? Let them smile,

My folly at least revealed those three great laws;

Gave me the golden vases of the Egyptians,

To set in the great new temple of my God

Beyond the bounds of Egypt.

They will forget

My methods, doubtless, as the years go by,

And the world's wisdom shuts its music out.

The dust will gather on all my harmonies;

Or scholars turn my pages listlessly,

Glance at the musical phrases, and pass on,

Not troubling even to read one Latin page.

Yet they'll accept those great results as mine.

I call them mine. How can I help exulting,

Who climbed my ladder of music to the skies

And found, by accident, let them call it so,

Or by the inspiration of that Power

Which built His world of music, those three laws:--

First, how the speed of planets round the sun

Bears a proportion, beautifully precise

As music, to their silver distances;

Next, that although they seem to swerve aside

From those plain circles of old Copernicus

Their paths were not less rhythmical and exact,

But followed always that most exquisite curve

In its most perfect form, the pure ellipse;

Third, that although their speed from point to point

Appeared to change, their radii always moved

Through equal fields of space in equal times.

Was this my infidelity, was this

Less full of beauty, less divine in truth,

Than their dull chaos? You, the poet will know

How, as those dark perplexities grew clear,

And old anomalous discords changed to song,

My whole soul bowed and cried, Almighty God

These are Thy thoughts, I am thinking after Thee!

I hope that Tycho knows. I owed so much

To Tycho Brahe; for it was he who built

The towers from which I hailed those three great laws.

How strange and far away it all seems now.

The thistles grow upon that little isle

Where Tycho's great Uraniborg once was.

Yet, for a few sad years, before it fell

Into decay and ruin, there was one

Who crept about its crumbling corridors,

And lit the fire of memory on its hearth."--

Wotton looked quickly up, "I think I have heard

Something of that. You mean poor Jeppe, his dwarf.

Fynes Moryson, at the Mermaid Inn one night

Showed a most curious manuscript, a scrawl

On yellow parchment, crusted here and there

With sea-salt, or the salt of those thick tears

Creatures like Jeppe, the crooked dwarf, could weep.

It had been found, clasped in a crooked hand,

Under the cliffs of Wheen, a crooked hand

That many a time had beckoned to passing ships,

Hoping to find some voyager who would take

A letter to its master.

The sailors laughed

And jeered at him, till Jeppe threw stones at them.

And now Jeppe, too, was dead, and one who knew

Fynes Moryson, had found him, and brought home

That curious crooked scrawl. Fynes Englished it

Out of its barbarous Danish. Thus it ran:

'Master, have you forgotten Jeppe, your dwarf,

Who used to lie beside the big log-fire

And feed from your own hand? The hall is dark,

There are no voices now,--only the wind

And the sea-gulls crying round Uraniborg.

I too am crying, Master, even I,

Because there is no fire upon the hearth,

No light in any window. It is night,

And all the faces that I knew are gone.

Master, I watched you leaving us. I saw

The white sails dwindling into sea-gull's wings,

Then melting into foam, and all was dark.

I lay among the wild flowers on the cliff

And dug my nails into the stiff white chalk

And called you, Tycho Brahe. You did not hear;

But gulls and jackdaws, wheeling round my head,

Mocked me with Tycho Brahe, and Tycho Brahe!

You were a great magician, Tycho Brahe;

And, now that they have driven you away,

I, that am only Jeppe,--the crooked dwarf,

You used to laugh at for his matted hair,

And head too big and heavy--take your pen

Here in your study. I will write it down

And send it by a sailor to the King

Of Scotland, and who knows, the mouse that gnawed

The lion free, may save you, Tycho Brahe.'"

"He is free now," said Kepler, "had he lived

He would have sent for Jeppe to join him there

At Prague. But death forestalled him, and your King.

The years in which he watched that planet Mars,

His patient notes and records, all were mine;

And, mark you, had he clipped or trimmed one fact

By even a hair's-breadth, so that his results

Made a pure circle of that planet's path

It might have baffled us for an age and drowned

All our new light in darkness. But he held

To what he saw. He might so easily,

So comfortably have said, 'My instruments

Are crude and fallible. In so fine a point

Eyes may have erred, too. Why not acquiesce?

Why mar the tune, why dislocate a world,

For one slight clash of seeming fact with faith?'

But no, though stars might swerve, he held his course,

Recording only what his eyes could see

Until death closed them.

Then, to his results,

I added mine and saw, in one wild gleam,

Strange as the light of day to one born blind,

A subtler concord ruling them and heard

Profounder tones of harmony resolve

Those broken melodies into song again."--

"Faintly and far away, I, too, have seen

In music, and in verse, that golden clue

Whereof you speak," said Wotton. "In all true song,

There is a hidden logic. Even the rhyme

That, in bad poets, wrings the neck of thought,

Is like a subtle calculus to the true,

An instrument of discovery. It reveals

New harmonies, new analogies. It links

Far things and near, not in unnatural chains,

But in those true accords which still escape

The plodding reason, yet unify the world.

I caught some glimpses of this mystic power

In verses of your own, that elegy

On Tycho, and that great quatrain of yours--

I cannot quite recall the Latin words,

But made it roughly mine in words like these:

'I know that I am dust, and daily die;

Yet, as I trace those rhythmic spheres at night,

I stand before the Thunderer's throne on high

And feast on nectar in the halls of light.'

My version lacks the glory of your lines

But..."

"Mine too was a version,"

Kepler laughed,

"Turned into Latin from old Ptolemy's Greek;

For, even in verse, half of the joy, I think,

Is just to pass the torch from hand to hand

An undimmed splendour. But, last night, I tried

Some music all my own. I had a dream

That I was wandering in some distant world.

I have often dreamed it Once it was the moon.

I wrote that down in prose. When I am dead,

It may be printed. This was a fairer dream:

For I was walking in a far-off spring

Upon the planet, Venus. Only verse

Could spread true wings for that delicious world;

And so I wrote it--for no eyes but mine,

Or 'twould be seized on, doubtless, as fresh proof

Of poor old Kepler's madness."--

"Let me hear,

Madman to madman; for I, too, write verse."

Then Kepler, in a rhythmic murmur, breathed

His rich enchanted memories of that dream:

"Beauty burned before me

Swinging a lanthorn through that fragrant night.

I followed a distant singing,

And a dreaming light

How she led me, I cannot tell

To that strange world afar,

Nor how I walked, in that wild glen

Upon the sunset star.

Winged creatures floated

Under those rose-red boughs of violet bloom,

With delicate forms unknown on Earth

'Twixt irised plume and plume;

Human-hearted, angel-eyed,

And crowned with unknown flowers;

For nothing in that enchanted world

Followed the way of ours.

Only I saw that Beauty,

On Hesper, as on earth, still held command;

And though, as one in slumber,

I roamed that radiant land,

With all these earth-born senses sealed

To what the Hesperians knew,

The faithful lanthorn of her law

Was mine on Hesper too.

Then, half at home with wonder,

I saw strange flocks of flowers like birds take flight;

Great trees that burned like opals

To lure their loves at night;

Dark beings that could move in realms

No dream of ours has known.

Till these became as common things

As men account their own.

Yet, when that lanthorn led me

Back to the world where once I thought me wise;

I saw, on this my planet,

What souls, with awful eyes.

Hardly I dared to walk her fields

As in that strange re-birth

I looked on those wild miracles

The birds and flowers of earth."

Silence a moment held them, loth to break

The spell of that strange dream,

"One proof the more"

Said Wotton at last, "that songs can mount and fly

To truth; for this fantastic vision of yours

Of life in other spheres, awakes in me,

Either that slumbering knowledge of Socrates,

Or some strange premonition that the years

Will prove it true. This music leads us far

From all our creeds, except that faith in law.

Your quest for knowledge--how it rests on that!

How sure the soul is that if truth destroy

The temple, in three days the truth will build

A nobler temple; and that order reigns

In all things. Even your atheist builds his doubt

On that strange faith; destroys his heaven and God

In absolute faith that his own thought is true

To law, God's lanthorn to our stumbling feet;

And so, despite himself, he worships God,

For where true souls are, there are God and heaven."--

"It is an ancient wisdom. Long ago,"

Said Kepler, "under the glittering Eastern sky,

The shepherd king looked up at those great stars,

Those ordered hosts, and cried Caeli narrant

Gloriam Dei!

Though there be some to-day

Who'd ape Lucretius, and believe themselves

Epicureans, little they know of him

Who, even in utter darkness, bowed his head,

To something nobler than the gods of Rome

Reigning beyond the darkness.

They accept

The law, the music of these ordered worlds;

And straight deny the law's first postulate,

That out of nothingness nothing can be born,

Nor greater things from less. Can music rise

By chance from chaos, as they said that star

In Serpentarius rose? I told them, then,

That when I was a boy, with time to spare,

I played at anagrams. Out of my Latin name

Johannes Keplerus came that sinister phrase

Serpens in akuleo. Struck by this,

I tried again, but trusted it to chance.

I took some playing cards, and wrote on each

One letter of my name. Then I began

To shuffle them; and, at every shuffle, I read

The letters, in their order, as they came,

To see what meaning chance might give to them.

Wotton, the gods and goddesses must have laughed

To see the weeks I lost in studying chance;

For had I scattered those cards into the black

Epicurean eternity, I'll swear

They'd still be playing at leap-frog in the dark,

And show no glimmer of sense. And yet--to hear

Those wittols talk, you'd think you'd but to mix

A bushel of good Greek letters in a sack

And shake them roundly for an age or so,

To pour the Odyssey out.

At last, I told,

Those disputants what my wife had said. One night

When I was tired and all my mind a-dust

With pondering on their atoms, I was called

To supper, and she placed before me there

A most delicious salad. 'It would appear,'

I thought aloud, 'that if these pewter dishes,

Green hearts of lettuce, tarragon, slips of thyme,

Slices of hard boiled egg, and grains of salt.

With drops of water, vinegar and oil,

Had in a bottomless gulf been flying about

From all eternity, one sure certain day

The sweet invisible hand of Happy Chance

Would serve them as a salad.'

'Likely enough,'

My wife replied, 'but not so good as mine,

Nor so well dressed.'"

They laughed. Susannah's voice

Broke in, "I've made a better one. The receipt

Came from the Golden Lion. I have dished

Ducklings and peas and all. Come, John, say grace."