In Babylon, in Babylon,
They baked their tablets of the clay;
And, year by year, inscribed thereon
The dark eclipses of their day;
They saw the moving finger write
Its Mene, Mene, on their sun.
A mightier shadow cloaks their light,
And clay is clay in Babylon.
A shadow moved towards him from the door.
Copernicus, with a cry, upraised his head.
“The book, I cannot see it, let me feel
The lettering on the cover.
It
is here!
Put out the lamp, now. Draw those curtains back,
And let me die with starlight on my face.
An angel’s hand in mine . . . yes; I can say
My nunc dimittis now . . . light, and more
light
In that pure realm whose darkness is our peace.”
TYCHO BRAKE
They thought him a magician, Tycho Brahe,
Who lived on that strange island in the Sound,
Nine miles from Elsinore.
His
legend reached
The Mermaid Inn the year that Shakespeare died.
Fynes Moryson had brought his travellers’ tales
Of Wheen, the heart-shaped isle where Tycho made
His great discoveries, and, with Jeppe, his dwarf,
And flaxen-haired Christine, the peasant girl,
Dreamed his great dreams for five-and-twenty years.
For there he lit that lanthorn of the law,
Uraniborg; that fortress of the truth,
With Pegasus flying above its loftiest tower,
While, in its roofs, like wide enchanted eyes
Watching, the brightest windows in the world,
Opened upon the stars.
Nine miles from Elsinore, with all those ghosts,
There’s magic enough in that! But white-cliffed
Wheen,
Six miles in girth, with crowds of hunchback waves
Crawling all round it, and those moonstruck windows,
Held its own magic, too; for Tycho Brahe
By his mysterious alchemy of dreams
Had so enriched the soil, that when the king
Of England wished to buy it, Denmark asked
A price too great for any king on earth.
“Give us,” they said, “in scarlet
cardinal’s cloth
Enough to cover it, and, at every corner,
Of every piece, a right rose-noble too;
Then all that kings can buy of Wheen is yours.
Only,” said they, “a merchant bought it
once;
And, when he came to claim it, goblins flocked
All round him, from its forty goblin farms,
And mocked him, bidding him take away the stones
That he had bought, for nothing else was his.”
These things were fables. They were also true.
They thought him a magician, Tycho Brahe,
The astrologer, who wore the mask of gold.
Perhaps he was. There’s magic in the truth;
And only those who find and follow its laws
Can work its miracles.
Tycho
sought the truth
From that strange year in boyhood when he heard
