Verse for the Solar Eclipse by Dickenson, Wilcox, and Bly—National Poetry Month 2024

 

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you know that there will be a highly touted total eclipse of the Sun today visible from an arcing swath reaching from Texas to parts of New England.  The event has been widely covered for weeks and hundreds of thousands are expected to flock to areas which will experience totality ringing up tourist dollars and snarling traffic.  After predictions that cloud cover would obscure the view over much of the path, new forecasts are for mostly clear conditions over much or most of the track through the Midwest. Major TV networks and cable channels will have live coverage with their top anchors.  It will also stream live on multiple platforms.

The map shows the path of eclipse totality peek times.

Here in the northwest boonies of the Chicago metroplex we can expect to experience 90% coverage.  But as Annie Dillard observed “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relationship to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”  Many who carefully observe the Solar Eclipse find it an especially moving, even life-altering experience. 

It was so even for the ancients.  Many cultures built myths around the event.  The Sun being devoured by some giant creature—a dragon in China, a bear or puma among some North American indigenous cultures.  Other time it was destroyed or stolen by an angry, jealous, or capricious deity.  In at least one case the eclipse is the result of a jealous spat been the lovers the Sun (feminine) and the Moon (masculine).

In Chinese mythology the dragon is the magical creature that swallows the sun.

Eclipses were also considered omens.  The Greeks believed the sinking of Atlantis was accompanied by blot out of the Sun.  In the Christian New Testament an eclipse tag teamed with an earthquake when Jesus died on the cross on Good Friday.

They show up in literature as well.  James Fenimore Cooper wrote: 

At twelve minutes past eleven, the moon stood revealed in its greatest distinctness — a vast black orb, so nearly obscuring the sun that the face of the great luminary was entirely and absolutely darkened, though a corona of rays of light appeared beyond. The gloom of night was upon us. A breathless intensity of interest was felt by all. There would appear to be something instinctive in the feeling with which man gazes at all phenomena in the heavens. The peaceful rainbow, the heavy clouds of a great storm, the vivid flash of electricity, the falling meteor, the beautiful lights of the aurora borealis, fickle as the play of fancy, — these never fail to fix the attention with something of a peculiar feeling, different in character from that with which we observe any spectacle on the earth.

Perhaps most famously Mark Twain’s hero was saved from execution by successfully predicting a total eclipse using an almanac table and was rewarded by being made magician to King Arthur.

Poets have also taken notice, for example Emily Dickenson, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and Robert Bly.

Emily Dickenson viewed a total eclipse through a smoked glass--a big no no for you modern observers.

Sunset at Night—is natural

Sunset at Night—is natural—

But Sunset on the Dawn

Reverses Nature—Master--a

So Midnight’s—due—at Noon.

 

Eclipses be—predicted—

And Science bows them in—

But do one face us suddenly—

Jehovah’s Watch—is wrong.

 

—Emily Dickenson

Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

A Solar Eclipse

In that great journey of the stars through space

     About the mighty, all-directing Sun,

     The pallid, faithful Moon, has been the one

Companion of the Earth. Her tender face,

Pale with the swift, keen purpose of that race,

     Which at Time’s natal hour was first begun,

     Shines ever on her lover as they run

And lights his orbit with her silvery smile.

 

Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise,

     Down from her beaten path she softly slips,

And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes,

     Then in the gloaming finds her lover’s lips.

While far and near the men our world call wise

     See only that the Sun is in eclipse.

 

—Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 

Robert Bly.

Seeing the Eclipse in Maine

It started about noon. On top of Mount Batte,

We were all exclaiming. Someone had a cardboard

And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun

Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.

 

It was hard to believe. The high school teacher

We’d met called it a pinhole camera,

People in the Renaissance loved to do that.

And when the moon had passed partly through

 

We saw on a rock underneath a fir tree,

Dozens of crescents–made the same way–

Thousands! Even our straw hats produced

 A few as we moved them over the bare granite.

 

We shared chocolate, and one man from Maine

Told a joke. Suns were everywhere–at our feet.

—Robert Bly