Gazing at Poe’s “Evening Star”
If you gaze up at the sky after sunset, you can admire Poe’s “Evening Star” (Venus, the subject of an 1827 poem) and, just before sunup in the morning you can see the “ cold moon/’Mid planets her slaves ,” as the waning moon will then be accompanied by three bright planets : Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. Last week, while the moon was in its full phase, I took my eight year-old daughter out to our backyard for a poetry reading and astronomy lesson under the jaw-droppingly bright Venus, the “Evening Star” (though we can be agreed it’s not really a “star”). Unusually clear skies in L.A. due to the Coronavirus shutdown will soon be the stuff of legends, but they were enough of a reality still this past week for us to engage in stargazing after sunset, and exploring poetry, too. Poe’s “Evening Star” is easy reading that lets you meditate, lightly, on why the heavens have such an indelible hold on human imagination. As I said to my daughter augustly: “the thinking person likes to look at