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 the stars!” Poe’s 1827 offering does so with a whimsical air, that imagines the heavenly bodies have personalities. This is, of course, what early civilizations did, too, giving Venus and Mars the attributes of Gods, connecting the dots that shine in the sky to form constellations, and so forth.

Poe muses on the starry night or night sky in various poems, including “Tamerlane” (1827), “Al Aaraaf” (1829), “Israfel” (1831), “The Sleeper” (1841), and “Ulalume” (1847). The intro to “Evening Star,” in fact, is very similar to “The Sleeper,” though one emphasizes Venus (“Evening Star”) and one the moon (“The Sleeper”).

“Evening Star” (1827)	“The Sleeper” (1841)
’Twas noontide of summer, And mid-time of night; And stars, in their orbits, Shone pale, thro’ the light Of the brighter, cold moon, ’Mid planets her slaves, Herself in the Heavens, Her beam on the waves.	At midnight, in the month of June, I stand beneath the mystic moon. An opiate vapour, dewy, dim, Exhales from out her golden rim, And, softly dripping, drop by drop, Upon the quiet mountain top, Steals drowsily and musically Into the universal valley.

Both poems begin precisely the same way—with Poe pinpointing the date and time of our rumination. In “Evening Star,” it’s August—the middle (or “noontime”) of Summer. In fact, we know the date and time, precisely: it’s midnight on August 1st, if we are to take the words literally. In both poems, the action begins at the highest point in the sky and Poe slowly pans downward, like a movie director setting up an establishing shot, to the action below. We descend from “the stars in their orbits,” down to the moon and the planets and, lastly, to “Her beam on the waves.” (And, similarly, in “The Sleeper,” we come down from the moon, to the mountaintop and, finally, down to “the universal valley.”)

This part of the poem before us in the above excerpt is rhythmically very tight. You can sort of be-bop along to it as it bounces on a very elegant tempo. In fact, the musicality recalls the “Song” from “Al Aaraaf”—one of the other starlight poems (“’Neath blue-bell or streamer —/Or tufted wild spray/That keeps, from the dreamer,/ The moonbeam away”). Once having set up the rhythm, however, Poe improvises and riffs off the beat in the rest of the piece, like a jazz instrumentalist who stretches and bends the phrases of the main motif when performing a solo.

If we were to compare the moon and Venus, we could start, like Poe, by noting that the moon outshines Venus. But don’t count Venus out so fast. Venus is second only to the moon as the brightest object in the night sky. On its own, Venus is by far brighter than all the other planets/stars. In fact, Venus is so bright that, with a sharp eye, you can find it even while the sun is out! This is impressive, given that Venus is much farther from earth (almost 35 million miles) than the moon (a little more than one quarter million miles). Poe acknowledges that difference, with a nod to Venus “distant fire” to contrast to the moon’s “colder, lowly light.” Poe takes poetic license, however, in referring to Venus’ “fire,” because, as a planet rather than a star, Venus basically shines with reflected light just like the moon does. Poe did not know it, but he was on to something in one respect, and that is because Venus is a very hot place—the hottest planet in the solar system (even hotter than Mercury, which is closest to the sun), with an average surface temperature of 864 ° F.

One thing I found impressive is that, like the moon, Venus also has phases and, if you look at Venus through a telescope like my daughter and I did, it looks like a crescent right now. It is this little wedge of a shiny marble in the sky that looks so brilliant in the sky to the naked eye. This is because Venus is on the same side of the sun as we are at this time, as both it and earth gallop in the eternal race around our daytime star. Of course, as a planet, Venus is much larger than the moon (23,628 mile circumference, versus the moon’s 6,786 miles), which is another reason Venus is so bright.

In sum, “Evening Star” is an easy, unassuming poem favoring the humble planet over the garish moon, which provides an opportunity to dabble in entry-level astronomy, or just rubber-necking with the stars.