Skyward for December 2025
By
Doveed
Levy.
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As
tho' a star, in inmost heaven set,
Ev'n while we gaze on it,
Should slowly round his orb, and slowly grow
To a full face, there like a sun remain
Fix'd--then as slowly fade again,
And draw itself to what it was before;
So full, so deep, so slow, …
Tennyson,--Eleanore,
circa 1830.
This Christmas article begins with
an excerpt from Eleanore, one of the early poems written by Alfred
Tennyson. It is one of the finest pieces
of verse I have ever encountered. The
poem tells a story about a youthful Eleanore, who falls in love. But at a point in the fional third part of this
poem, he turns his tale into a sermon about variable stars. How could young Tennyson possibly know
anything about stars that change in brightness?
The American Association of Variable Star Observers, better known by its famous acronym
AAVSO, would not be founded for 81
years, in 1911.
Young Tennyson was almost certainly
familiar with the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander, who today is accredited
with launching the study of variable stars. It is probably that familiarity
that led the young poet to insert his little lecture on variable stars.
Some of Tennyson’s early poetry, published in the early 1830s,
was reviewed in the Journal Quarterly
Review: It went badly:
“We pass by two – what shall we call them? – tales, or
odes, or sketches, entitled “Mariana in the South” and “Eleanore”, of which we
fear we could make no intelligible extract, so curiously are they run together
into one dreamy tissue – to a little novel in rhyme, called “The Miller’s
Daughter”. Miller’s daughters, poor things, have been so generally betrayed by
their sweethearts, that it is refreshing to find that Mr Tennyson has united
himself to his miller’s daughter in lawful wedlock, and the poem is a history
of his courtship and wedding.”
Apparently Tennyson was sensitive to
this sarcastic and negative criticism, and he was so affected and hurt by this
review that he stopped publishing for almost a decade. His colleagues and
friends feared that he had given up writing, and possibly his life, but, as he
later told his son Hallam, he was busy revising his older poems, and “in
silence, obscurity, and solitude he perfected his art.”
I believe that the 1830s review was grossly
unfair. It was mean. I suspect that
these reviewers were using poetry they didn’t like to demonstrate how brilliant
they were. These reviewers are all long forgotten; I know of nobody who has not
heard of Tennyson. I know of many
people, besides me, who are just as sensitive to criticism as he was. (By the way, partly as a result of this ,I am
not an objective reviewer. I think that
if someone has the guts to write for publication, she or he deserves every
possible encouragement.)
When I recited this extract to
my friend Jean Mueller, a well-known
discoverer of 15 comets and 107
supernovae during the 29 years she worked at Palomar Observatory, she noticed the variable star connection the
minute I read it to her. She
agrees: “Was there a specific variable
star that he might have had in mind?” These lines teach their readers about
variable stars, stars that change in brightness. Such a star does “slowly grow/To a full
face” (its maximum brightness) and then “fade again,/And draw itself to what it
was before” (its minimum).
I have been an active observer of
variable stars for many decades. As Leslie
Peltier wrote on page 69 in his autobiography Starlight Nights, “A
variable star was a completely new experience; it was not just something that
was THERE, it was something that was HAPPENING!” On the evening of 30 August, 1975, my
interest in variable stars entered a new high when I independently discovered
Nova Cygni, a 1.6 magnitude exploding star, and then three years later a second
Nova Cygni. Variable stars are magical
to me, but this little poem from Tennyson is the first one I have found that
directly addresses the observation of stars that regularly change in brightness.
In
a way I wish I had known Tennyson.
But I am glad I do not, because that would mean that I am at least 175
years old. But I do know the famous and
highly regarded astrophysicist Jonathan Tennyson, Alfred’s great great
grandson, and we have been friends since I met him at University College London
a number of years ago. The Tennyson family is warm and friendly, and I think
the poet from long ago would have enjoyed that, and that an appreciation for
science still runs in his family. Alfred Lord Tennyson had the ability to take
a scientific fact, that some stars vary in brightness, and turn it into a verse that etches itself forever
into our hearts.
