‘“Then shall the sun be turned to darkness and the moon to blood…”’
I know about eclipses from an elder of the church.
He says we should expect the Lord to give these portents now.
God’s people, as in Joel’s day, must daily wait and watch.
I’m in the audience at Stratford. It’s my first King Lear.
Myopic, superstitious Gloucester, troubled at the sight:
‘These late eclipses of the sun and moon portend no good
to us…’ I think: about astrology, Edmund was right.
This cloudless, freezing night in March, I’m gazing at the sky
— at far-flung, automatic bodies falling into line;
the earth, the sun’s dumb slave, in silent mastery of its moon —
and wondering at the workings of the heavenly machine.
I’m not the first, nor best, to press his wonder into verse.
I’m reading disbelieving Hardy, following his thought
that in a motion so ordained and calm, ‘so small a shade’,
can be confined the beauty and confusion we have wrought.