The image is the Hubble ultra image deep field. Now and then, well oftener than that, I go looking for Hubble images, clues not so much to the how of creation, but glimpses of the pure artistry of God. The beauty of space, where no matter how much we magnify and zoom, there is still the sense of infinite distance, unthinkable scale, not so much the final frontier as that which renders all frontiers relative. Sometimes image and poem coincide. Reading Hopkins I came across the poem below, The Starlight Night. Of course another of my favourite paintings is Van Gogh's Starry Night, and I like Don MacLean's rendering of Starry Starry Night as well.
Anyway. Advent. A time when stargazers saw something that changed the way they saw everything else. A time to have our frontiers rendered relative. A time when, as Hopkins says, all is a prize, and thus a time for prayer, patience, aims, vows.
Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—
Ah
well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; within doors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.
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