Empyreal Pleiades Greetings
The seven sisters’ supernal sight
was by sailors stellarly prized
in legendary dove-likened flight,
catasterism immortalized.
As mythical frieze empyreal
they appear in stargazers’ view
of the Pleiades ethereal
fleeing in misty byways blue.
They’ve lent the cosmos fabled luster
ever since by the ancients found
being the nearest open cluster
astrally gravitation bound.
The firmament they loftily graced
brightly seen in nocturnal skies
as by Orion the nymphs were chased
in their sidereal disguise.
Tennyson wrote that these stars of night
while ‘rising through the mellow shade’
glitter like a swarm of firefly light
‘entangled in a silver braid’.
Did Yeats mean the sisters as ‘Seven
Lights’ that ‘bowed in their dance and wept’?
Here the Pleiades serve as leaven
to raise our hearts where hopes have slept.
When we are weary of worldly woes,
with pensive gaze turned overhead
perhaps in joy we’ll behold where those
celestial Pleiades still tread
and hear the heavens and nature sing
in these times of holiday cheer,
as yearnings for peace on earth take wing
with our dreams for the coming year…
~ Harley White
* * * * * * * * *
Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the Pleiades is a young star cluster known for its seven brightest stars, called the Seven Sisters. In both myth and science, the Pleiades are considered to be sibling stars. Modern astronomers say the Pleiades stars were born from the same cloud of gas and dust some 100 million years ago. This gravitationally bound cluster of several hundred stars looms some 430 light-years distant, and these sibling stars drift through space together at about 25 miles per second. Many of these Pleiades stars shine hundreds of times more brightly than our sun.
Copyright © Harley White | Year Posted 2021
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