'And Then, Look Up!'

Robert Conquest begins his poem “Nocturne” with a challenge to convention and cliché: “’Broad Daylight’ – words you speak or write / Imputing narrowness to Night?’” Seven sections follow, including the second: 

“Night’s only moonlit, starlit, yet

See from that delicate palette

The crested wave that brims the core

The breeze-blown-blossomed apple grove.”

 

We think of Conquest (1917-2015) primarily as a historian, the great chronicler of Stalin’s crimes and his apologists in the West, author of The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow. But he was also an accomplished poet, often identified with The Movement and his friends Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. He was an enthusiast of science fiction and his widow, Elizabeth Conquest, tells me he was a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society. Of the sciences, I find astronomy the most often cited in Conquest’s poems, usually accompanied by wonder. Take the fifth section of the poem:

 

“And then, look up! The clear Night is

Home to all deeps and distances

Where ritualled constellations reign

Like some scored musical refrain,

Voids vivid there with planets, stars,

Diamond Vega, vermilion Mars,

The pale mesh of the Milky Way,

The meteor-shower’s high, silent spray.”

 

Elizabeth Conquest – Liddie – suggests that her husband is alluding to a passage in Part III, Section XIV of Sir Thomas Browne’s Christian Morals (1716):

 

“Let thy Thoughts be of things which have not entered into the Hearts of Beasts: Think of things long past, and long to come: Acquaint thy self with the Choragium of the Stars, and consider the vast expansion beyond them.”

 

The OED defines Choragium as “the space in which a choral dance is performed, dancing-ground,” and gives Browne’s usage as the only citation. In other words, the night sky hosts a dance of the stars. We tend to think of the planets, stars and constellations as fixed points in the night sky – “ritualled.” Of course, they, like the Earth, are in perpetual motion. I’m reminded of a summer’s night at Pyramid Lake in the Adirondacks more than thirty years ago. I walked to the end of the dock and looked at the sky. Away from cities and their erasing lights, the sky appeared more white than black, nearly washing away the “Voids vivid.” Conquest even gets a little technical with astronomical terminology in the sixth section of “Nocturne”:

 

“—Just match their breadths and depths and heights.

Night’s limit to our naked sight’s

That faintest blur M 31

In Andromeda, two million

Light-years! – Rather different from

Day’s ten light minutes maximum!

In fact Days’ narrow limits are

Mere suburbs of one G-type star.”

 

[“Nocturne” appears in Conquest’s Penultimata (2009) and Collected Poems (2019), both published by Waywiser.]