After the dazzle of day is gone,
The dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars—
Give me nights perfectly quiet, and I on the beach at night,
Looking up at the stars.

I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited,
I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes,
Some shaped, others unshaped, with their varied degrees of perfection, climate, swiftness,
And all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher, edge but the rim of the farther systems.

Now, touch’d with the lives on other globes,
(Some probably are but forming, not so advanced as the earth, some arrived as far along as those of the earth, some no doubt more advanced,)
I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life,
Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.

Rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself in the mystical moist night air,
And from time to time, look’d up at the high-dilating stars,
Those far-off eternal stars, every star dilated, more vitreous, nearer than usual,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land,
The far-sprinkled systems clustering, studded, out by myriads,
Chandeliers of the universe, hung up there,
Beholding and mutually lit by each other’s lights.
The stars, suns, systems, circling, moved in order, safe, harmonious, conveying the sentiment of the mad, whirling, fullout speed of the stars, in their circular orbits.
(Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?)

Never did I realize more latent sentiment, almost passion, in those silent interminable stars up there,
From the whole dome shooting down points of light, rapport with me, through the clear blue-black,
A curious general luminousness throughout to sight, sense, and soul,
An undying chain and echelon of spiritual proofs and shows,
As if some superhuman symphony, some ode of universal vagueness, disdaining syllable and sound;
Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.

The splendor indescribable, yet something haughty, almost supercilious, in the night. All comparative silence and clear-shadow below. All the usual sense of motion, all animal life, seem’d discarded, seem’d a fiction. A curious power, like the placid rest of Egyptian gods, took possession. One can understand why, from the days of the Pharaohs or Job, the dome of heaven, sprinkled with planets, has supplied the subtlest, deepest criticism on human pride, glory, ambition.

Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter, dominating, majestic,
And nigh at hand, swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades,
Brilliant lustrous cluster free, tremulous with delicate sparkle, in the soft heavens.
But nothing can exceed the calm, fierce, golden, glistening domination of Mars,
Mars walks the heavens, lord-paramount now, never before so flaming bright, so flashing-large.

Venus, fascinating, swimming in tender glory,
In the earlier hours of evening, the great star has never been so large, so clear,
Venus, large to the last, with calm commanding seriousness and hauteur,
Shining even to the edge of the horizon, like blazing silver with a voluptuous dazzle,
Of a size and lustre as if trying to outshow herself, before departing,
Now languid and shorn of her beams, as if from some divine excess.

A moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain’d me,
The star my departing comrade, with silver face in the night, holds and detains me,
It seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity.
O western orb sailing the heaven—teeming, maternal orb—I take you again to myself,
I saw you had something to tell as we wander’d together the solemn night,
As you bent to me night after night,
As you early droop’d in the western sky, low down as if to my side, while the other stars all look’d on,
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you were of woe.

O great star disappear’d, (O the black murk that hides the star!)
O powerful western fallen star!
My soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank,
As where you sad orb concluded, dropt in the night, and were gone.
I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.

Three or four great black clouds, seemingly from different points, sweeping with broad swirls of wind, underspread the orbs from view. Here and there throughout the heavens a random star appearing and disappearing; at times a half-dimm’d sadden’d far-off star, appearing and disappearing.

Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
They shall not long possess the sky,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They devour the stars only in apparition.
Be patient, watch again another night,
Jupiter shall emerge, the Pleiades shall emerge, Venus shall emerge—
They are immortal,
The vast immortal suns shall shine again.

As onward silently stars aloft,
Eastward new ones upward stole—
Sirius very bright, the sun of the night, calmly arrogant, most wondrous single star, rising early;
Many-orb’d Orion, chief histrion of the stage-spread, glittering, vast, sworded, his shiny yellow rosette on his shoulder, chasing with his dog;
Arcturus right overhead, ambitiously large and sparkling, as if he meant to challenge with Sirius the stellar supremacy;
The long curling-slanted Scorpion stretching full view in the south, with red Antares glowing in its neck;
The great constellation of the Water-Serpent stretch’d its coils over more than half the heavens;
The shining clusters and the Milky Way of stars,
The Swan with outspread wings was flying down the Milky Way.

Night of the large few stars,
A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,
Placid beckoning stars, away off sextillions of miles, far, far out of reach.
Yet it isn’t only the palpable stars;
There are millions of other stars in the heavens, millions, some as great,
Perhaps some we do not see surpassing the best we see.

Astronomers say there are dark, or almost dark, unnotic’d orbs and suns rolling through space, real and potent as any—perhaps the most real and potent. Yet none recks of them. In the bright lexicon we give the spreading heavens, they have not even names. Amid ceaseless sophistications all times, the soul would seem to glance yearningly around for such contrasts—such cool, still offsets.

You power that does this work!
You unseen force, centripetal, centrifugal, through space’s spread,
What are the messages by you from distant stars to us?

The sky and stars speak no word, nothing to the intellect,
Yet as I ponder in silence, of a fine night,
Questions are answer’d to the soul,
The best answers that can be given.
Creation noiselessly sinks into and through me its placid and untellable lesson,
The  stars so eloquent, so communicative to the soul, hint from their orbits of millions of leagues afar, that there is a region beyond—O, so infinitely beyond!—anything from art, books, sermons, or from science, old or new.

How the sun, moon, stars, dart on and on!
Splendid suns, the moons and rings,
Shine, and shine, and shine forever,
On and on they roll forever,
Every star now clear-cut, showing for just what it is, eternal—
I believe I have this night a clue through the universes,
I believe I have this night thought a thought of the clef of eternity.

As I watch the stars shining, so quiet and bright, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.  I do not doubt that the orbs and the systems of orbs play their swift sports through the air on purpose, and that I shall one day be eligible to do as much as they, and more than they. I suppose I am to be eligible to visit the stars, in my time.

Another stately and solemn night, I was awake much, watching the stars as they twinkled, and saw the countless armies of heaven marching stilly in the space up there, marching stilly and slowly on, and others coming up out of the east to take their places. An indescribable serenity pervaded my mind—a delicious abnegation of the ties of the body. Thoughts of the boundless creation must have expanded my mind. I fancied myself leaping forward into the extent of the space, springing as it were from star to star.

See you! the comet that came unannounced out of the north flaring in heaven,
The strange huge meteor-procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads,
Myriads in all directions, some with long shining trains,
Some rolling over each other like water poured out and falling—leaping, silent, white apparitions of the sky.
A moment, a moment long it sail’d its balls of unearthly light over our heads,
So spectral-fierce, like some great, pale, living monster of the air or sea,
Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone.

As I flit through hastily, transient and strange, soon to fall and be gone,
What is this chant, what am I myself but one of your meteors?
Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,
Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring,
Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest.

How splendid, above all,  the moon—
That the moon spins round the earth and on with the earth is wonderful,
And that they balance themselves with the sun and stars is wonderful

It is new moon and twilight,
Illustrious the pale reflection on the new moon in the western sky,
The sky and air so clear, such transparent hues of color.
Last evening I saw the first of the new moon over my right shoulder—a sure sign of good luck,
It hung delicate just above the sulky shadow of the mountains, half an hour high,
Sinking languidly under a bar-sinister of cloud, and then emerging—
The large, pale, thin crescent of the new moon,
The exquisite, delicate, thin curve of the new moon,
The thinnest cut crescent possible, the outlined old moon clear along with it,
It seem’d to me I had never really seen the new moon before.

The moon a little past its first quarter,
The moon like a young mother,
Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly—
Ah, if it might prove an omen and good prophecy. 

Low hangs the moon, it rose late,
The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping,
Late-risen and swollen as if with tears.
It is lagging—O I think it is heavy with love, with love.

The moon, an hour high, is past her half, and looks somehow more like a human face up there than ever before. As it grows later, we have such gorgeous and broad cloud-effects.
The moon swam on, the sky held two vast fan-shaped echelons of light clouds, through which the moon waded, now radiating, carrying with her an aureole of tawny transparent brown, and now flooding the whole vast with clear vapory light-green, through which, as through an illuminated veil, she moved with measur’d womanly motion.

Under the full of the moon, shimmering and shifting, delicate color-effects of pellucid green and tawny vapor, with tawny halos, silver edgings. Never a more glorious moon, floundering through the drifts, great fleeces, depths of blue-black in patches, and occasionally long, low bars hanging silently a while, and then gray bulging masses rolling along stately, sometimes in long procession.
The silvery round moon shone out from a cloud and scattered a flood of light on the wooded banks, the water, and everything else, pouring silvery soft its radiant patches over all. It seemed like a good omen.

The vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue,
Throwing down a broad dazzle of highway on the waters,
Beautiful over the house-tops—ghastly, phantom moon.
I perceived that the ghastly glimmer was noonday sunbeams reflected—
Lo, the sun, its glory floods the moon,
Which of a night shines in some turbid pool,
Shaken by soughing winds;
There are sparkles mad and tossed and broken,
And their archetype is the sun.

O moon immense and silent, with your silvery face you soothe me!
Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon,
Lustrous flooding moon, full of reality, full of illusion—
Is there not something about the moon, some relation or reminder, which no poem or literature has yet caught?

The rare nocturnal scene, how soon it sooth’d and pacified me,
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,
The air, the stars, the moon—what a fullness of inspiration they imparted! what exhiliration!
The planets, the moderate west wind, the elastic temperature, the miracle of that great star, and the moon swimming in the west, suffused the soul,
It was a great, a precious, a memorable, experience,
Everything a miracle of splendor, moon splendor and star splendor—
And silently by my side my dear friend— 
Something altogether to filter through one’s soul,
And nourish and feed and soothe the memory long afterwards.

NEXT: CREATURES OF THE AIR

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).