Hello Friends,
I sent you shorter poems the past couple of days, so today I'm hoping you'll stick around for a longer, harder poem.
Adrienne Rich gives us the note that this piece is inspired by Caroline Herschel (1750 - 1848), the first woman in England to be paid for her work in astronomy, the first female elected to the Royal Astronomical Society, and the discoverer of several comets. "And others" probably refers to the many other women in astronomy whose work was attributed to men or otherwise lost.
Some accounts of Herschel's childhood claim her parents thought she was too ugly to marry and prepared her for the life of a domestic servant — Rich may be referring to this narrative in starting the poem "A woman in the shape of a monster." However, Herschel was able to follow her older brother William into ventures in music and then astronomy.
"Planetarium" appeared in Rich's collection The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970.
Enjoy.
Ellen
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
a woman 'in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles'
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind
An eye,
'virile, precise and absolutely certain'
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us
Tycho whispering at last
'Let me not seem to have lived in vain'
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
■
Adrienne Rich was also featured for Meet Me in 811's Poem-A-Day April 27, 2012 and Poem-A-Day April 25, 2008.