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TECHNICAL NOTE: The great majority of the links below are to scanned antique books at the Internet Archive, most of them anthologies. Poems frequently run for several pages; when coming to the apparent end of a poem, turn the page to make sure!

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General --- Comets and Meteors --- Cosmology --- Eternity/Infinity (on another page) --- Extraterrestrial Life --- Planets and Solar System --- Space Science (on another page) --- Stars and Nebulæ --- People --- Back to Main Subject Index

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• ASTRONOMY: General and Cosmological
  • Barbauld, Anna Lætitia: A Summer Evening's Meditation. "On Fancy's wild and roving wing I sail from the green borders of the peopled Earth ... to the dim verge, the suburbs of the system, where cheerless Saturn 'midst his watery moons sits like an exiled monarch ..."
  • Bryant, William Cullen: Song of the Stars Young solar systems rejoice at the prospects ahead of them.
  • Chapin, Charles W. E., Jr.: The Dead Astronomer
  • Clough, Arthur Hugh: Dipsychus, II, v: The scene begins with a solar-system metaphor; the last lines of the previous scene also allude to astronomy, and there other similar references scattered through the play.
  • Clough, Arthur Hugh: Selene Gravitation and optics as erotic metaphors.
  • Clough, Arthur Hugh: Uranus Takes a Platonist view of astronomy as a road to higher wisdom rather than as something valuable in itself.
  • Cowper, William: From The Task: Book III (Starting at 'Some drill and bore // The solid earth, and from the strata there'). Strong religiously motivated attack on science (especially geology and astronomy), although later presents a less detailed vision of the 'Christian philosopher', epitomised by Newton.
  • Däubler, Theodor: Millionen Nachtigallen schlagen. Meaning the stars, possibly.
  • Däubler, Theodor: Das Nordlicht An epic poem which is both a critique of technological society and the elaboration of a pseudo-scientific mythology involving the aurora, lava-pools, and the sun.
  • De Morgan, Augustus: The Astronomer's Drinking Song: De Morgan claimed that he did not write the song, but found it among the papers of an unnamed deceased friend. He admitted, however, to having "restored" it.
  • Dixon, Richard Watson: Inscience Psychological poem using astronomical metaphors.
  • Dixon, Richard Watson: The Silent Heavens The depressing effect of the Copernican world-view.
  • Duganne, Augustine: Injuresoul: A Satire for Science The title refers to the famous agnostic Robert Ingersoll, but the poem also attacks Darwinism, mainstream science, and rationalism in general. Duganne's endnotes present his own extremely unorthodox, vaguely alchemical "scientific" theories, which he intends to be more compatible with Christianity: "Nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen ... eliminate those three gases ... and we should again breathe the air Adam breathed in Eden."
  • Fitzpatrick, Patrick Vincent: Gas Antiphlogistic: From Thaumaturgus. See also the next poem, 'Del Volo'.
  • Foley, J. W.: Scientific Proof Actually more "mathematical proof". Although not terribly funny, it contains some nice phrases (e.g. "the real square root of North") and is a memento of the several centuries when polar exploration was closely linked to mathematical astronomy.
  • Foley, J. W.: The Unrest of Knowledge Comic version of the (very real) depressing effect that pessimistic cosmological speculations had on Late Victorian thought.
  • Freneau, Philip Morin: The Almanac Maker A satire against scientific astronomy. Interestingly, the protagonist is much worried about the sources of the sun's energy and their eventual exhaustion.
  • Gilder, Richard Watson: The Invisible Quite a different reaction to a learn'd astronomer's lecture from Whitman's!
  • Hamilton, William Rowan: At Midnight The majesty of the night sky soothes a depressed young man's troubled soul.
  • Hamilton, William Rowan: Parsonstown Sonnet No. 1 "Written in the upper gallery of the great telescope." Lord Rosse's telescope, "the Leviathan of Parsonstown", was one of the great scientific instruments of the Nineteenth Century.
  • Herman, Jay H.: Night on the Desert
  • Herschel, John: Requiem for the Forty-Feet Reflector at Slough A New Year's song sung by the Herschels inside the tube of the giant decommissioned scope in 1840.
  • Holmes, Oliver Wendell: Wind-Clouds and Star-Drifts A very long poem embedded in Holmes's novel The Poet at the Breakfast-Table; the speaker is a character called only "the Young Astronomer". Like Tennyson's In Memoriam and several other classic Victorian poems, Wind-Clouds and Star-Drifts explores the apparently widening gap between Science and Faith, and the problem of how to lead a meaningful life in a world where God's existence is more of a fervent hope than a self-evident fact.
  • Housman, A. E.: Astronomy Actually an elegy for a soldier killed in the Boer War, using imagery from geocentric astronomy.
  • Ireland, William Henry: Stultifera Navis, XXXVIII "Of Foolish Astronomers and Stargazers."
  • Kendall, May: A Warning to New Worlds Urges other planets to avoid replicating Earth's unfortunate evolutionary path -- don't even solidify, if you can help it!.
  • Masters, Edgar Lee: Alonzo Churchill: A Romantic astronomer.
  • Masters, Edgar Lee: Over the Soundless Depths (The Sun's Song): The end of the Spoon River Anthology.
  • Meredith, George: Lucifer in Starlight: Milton's Satan is depressed by the spectacle of the universal order.
  • Meredith, George: Meditation Under Stars "What links are ours with orbs that are // So resolutely far?"
  • Miyazawa Kenji: Fantasia Under the Clear Sky (at the Mizusawa Observatory) An interesting contrast to Whitman's Learnéd Astronomer. Ninomiya-Enright translation, 1957: the English text is probably under copyright. (The poem starts at the bottom of the page, but continues.)
  • Noel, Roden: Livingstone in Africa, Canto V Livingstone contemplates the stars, and later imagines a Christian and industrialised (but not Europeanised) Africa.
  • Noyes, Alfred: Watchers of the Sky History of astronomy in verse.
    • The Observatory
    • Copernicus
    • Tycho Brahe
    • Kepler
    • Galileo
    • Newton
    • William Herschel Conducts
    • Sir John Herschel Remembers
    • Epilogue
  • Patmore, Coventry: The Two Deserts
  • Robinson, Mary F.: The Stars A subtle Victorian doubt poem with extraterrestrial life and cosmic vastness.
  • Rossetti, Christina: All Thy Works Praise Thee, O Lord including galaxies and nebulæ: "No thing is far or near, and therefore we float neither far nor near; but where we be weave dances round the Throne perpetually."
  • Seward, Anna: The Terrestrial Year passing through the Signs of the Zodiac The poem itself is not terribly scientific, but it was directly inspired (as Seward's own introduction notes) by contact with astronomers and scientific literature.
  • Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Queen Mab The Nineteenth Century equivalent of The Golden Compass: fairy tale (leavened with cutting-edge science) in the service of atheism. See also the first few of Shelley's notes, giving the astronomical inspiration of the poem.
  • Sill, Edward Rowland: A Child and a Star The child's imagination infuses dull astronomical reality with beauty and meaning.
  • Sill, Edward Rowland: Space A Nineteenth Century example of the "spaceship Earth" mythos.
  • Smith, Clark Ashton: Ode to the Abyss
  • Smith, Horace: The Astronomical Alderman A politician advocates the Flat Earth Theory. A modern reader is less likely to be amused by the comic poem itself than by the coincidence that the alderman's nickname is "Hubble Bubble".
  • Tabb, John Bannister: The Astronomer The brain is more astonishing than the sky.
  • Taylor, Bert Leston: A Ballade of Star Dust: "Star dust our end, from dust we came: // The stuff of Cosmos is the same."
  • Tilton, Theodore: The Chant Celestial Religious poem with a few scientific allusions.
  • Todd, Mabel Loomis: Valedictory Lines to A1, the train that carried the Amherst eclipse-observing expedition.
  • Tupper, Martin: Of the Starry Heavens Combines fairly extensive knowledge of astronomy with odd speculations about the various planets as suitable homes for angels (e.g. the gas giants are less grossly material than the Earth).
  • Turner, Herbert Hall: Astronomers We: Doggerel about an eclipse expedition to Hokkaido. The Coronet was a ship.
  • White, Henry Kirke: Lines Written on a Survey of the Heavens Astronomy leads to thoughts of God and the vanity of earthly ambitions.
  • Whitman, Walt: When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer This is often considered the quintessential anti-science poem, but Whitman was part of a pro-science Romantic tradition. His real target is not science per se, but science divorced from direct, often mystical, experience of Nature.
    • Musical setting by Kevin Cope
    • Musical setting by Jeremy Harris
    • Musical setting by Barry Seroff
    • Musical setting by Roger Zahab
  • Wilcox, Ella Wheeler: Sirius Although the "droll tale of Genesis" is absurdly parochial, the vastness of the universe revealed by modern astronomy testifies to the incomprehensible greatness of God.
  • Williams, Sarah: The Old Astronomer Famous (but over-long) sentimental poem about a dying scientist. Contains the much-quoted line "I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night."
  • Willis, Nathaniel Parker: The Scholar of Thebet Ben Khorat In Twenty-first Century English, the title would be "The Student Assistant of Thābit ibn Qurra," the Ninth Century Sabian scientist and wizard. More technical than most astronomy poems, even though the moral is that science drives people mad.
  • Wordsworth, William: Star Gazers Although the poet is unsure of the reason, people who look through a telescope always go away less happy than before. Arguably one of the most anti-scientific poems of the century, the more surprising in light of Wordsworth's long, friendly association with astronomers, including the Hamiltons. Perhaps it is significant that the telescope is operated by a "Show-man" and the people who go away unhappy are said to "pry & pore" as they look through it. In any case, an early poem (1806).

• ASTRONOMY: Comets and Meteors
  • Abercrombie, Lascelles: The End of the World A play in verse about the approach of a comet.
  • Evanson, R. T.: Shooting Stars, or the Fall of Meteors. Science explains phenomena that would once have inspired superstitious terror. Inspired by an actual meteor shower in 1866.
  • Foley, J. W.: The Unrest of Knowledge Comic version of the (very real) depressing effect that pessimistic cosmological speculations had on Late Victorian thought.
  • Hardy, Thomas: The Comet at Yalbury or Yell'ham When it comes back, you'll be dead.
  • Havergal, Frances Ridley: The Star Shower of November 14, 1866.
  • Hawker, Robert Stephen: The Comet of 1861 with a decidedly odd theological-astronomical note about the significance of the conic sections, and a reference in the poem itself to the panspermia hypothesis.
  • Hayne, Paul Hamilton: A New Philosophy; or, Star Showers Explained "It's the Fourth of July up yonder // And the wockets is whizzing yoff!"
  • Herman, Jay H.: Canyon Diablo About the Arizona Meteor Crater.
  • Hogg, James: Verses to the Comet of 1811 Thought by Hogg to be the same as the Star of Bethlehem.
  • Holmes, Oliver Wendell: The Comet After a heavy meal, the poet has a comic/apocalyptic dream about a comet frying the Earth.
  • Sigourney, Lydia H.: The Comet of 1825
  • Smith, Clark Ashton: Song of a Comet
  • Smith, J. R.: Address to the Comet Meant to be humourous.
  • Taylor, Benjamin F.: The New Craft in the Offing Meaning the Comet of 1858.
  • Taylor, Bert Leston: The Astronomer ... is puzzled by the return of Encke's comet.
  • Taylor, Bert Leston: The Day of the Comet, and the Morning After
  • Taylor, Bert Leston: Farewell! ... to the comet.
  • Taylor, Bert Leston: In Statu Quo Since unfortunately there are no comets on a collision course with the Earth, the "so-called human race" will continue its dominance.
  • Very, Jones: The Comet: Essentially a pre-scientific poem.
  • Watson, William: The Prodigy About a comet visible during the Great War.
  • Whitman, Walt: Year of Meteors The year 1859-1860, significant astronomically and otherwise.

• ASTRONOMY: Extraterrestrial Life
  • Allingham, William: Rising of Jupiter Which might have inhabitants: "Heed they at all, for their part, our little one-moon'd planet?"
  • Dixon, Richard Watson: To the Earth Planet Are you the only one with intelligent life?
  • Doyle, Sir Francis Hastings: Short Analysis of The Plurality of Worlds Famous joke about the Trinity College cosmologist William Whewell.
  • Hardy, Thomas: The Aerolite Panspermia. (Published 1927; under copyright in some countries.)
  • Hardy, Thomas: God-Forgotten Earth? Oh, maybe I did create that planet. But its inhabitants haven't stayed in touch like everybody else, have they?
  • Holmes, Oliver Wendell: The Secret of the Stars A prayer that God reveal whether or not there is life on other planets segues into an affirmation of American exceptionalism.
  • Kendall, May: The Fatal Advertisements Alien astronomers receive wireless broadcasts from Earth and assume the adverts must have some profound meaning.
  • Robinson, Mary F.: The Stars A subtle Victorian doubt poem with extraterrestrial life and cosmic vastness.
  • Streeter, Oscar W. ("The Homeless Boy"): A Dream of Life in Other Worlds, with God in Everything Argues that extraterrestrial races were unaffected by Adam's fall, and live in paradisiacal conditions.
  • Taylor, Bert Leston: A Ballade of Star Dust: "Star dust our end, from dust we came: // The stuff of Cosmos is the same."
  • Tennyson: Locksley Hall Sixty Years After Including remarks on how the Earth might appear from space.
  • Tupper, Martin: Of Curious Questions Among them, the question of extraterrestrial life.
  • Tupper, Martin: Of the Starry Heavens Combines fairly extensive knowledge of astronomy with odd speculations about the various planets as suitable homes for angels (e.g. the gas giants are less grossly material than the Earth).

• ASTRONOMY: Planetary System
  • Allingham, William: Rising of Jupiter Which might have inhabitants: "Heed they at all, for their part, our little one-moon'd planet?"
  • Bailey, Philip James: A Scotchman, wheresoe'er you chance to go ... will already be there: "And if, perchance, employed, // In prospecting a bran new asteroid, // Ae braw Scot wad be loomin' in the void."
  • Bailey, Philip James: Universal Hymn An attempt to update Psalm 148 with modern scientific knowledge. One passage discusses the theory that the Main Belt asteroids are fragments of a ruined planet, and suggests that they will be put back together in the world to come!
  • Barbauld, Anna Lætitia: A Summer Evening's Meditation. "On Fancy's wild and roving wing I sail from the green borders of the peopled Earth ... to the dim verge, the suburbs of the system, where cheerless Saturn 'midst his watery moons sits like an exiled monarch ..."
  • Barbauld, Anna Lætitia: The Transit of Mercury (To Baron de Stonne) "Who had wished at the next transit to find himself again between Mrs. La Borde and Mrs. Barbauld."
  • Beddoes, Thomas Lovell: The New-Born Star About a young planet.
  • Boker, George Henry: The Song of the Earth Rather strange 14 page poem, half astrology and half science, in which the Earth bitterly complains about the other planets.
  • Bowles, William Lisle: On an Eclipse of the Moon at Midnight
  • Chatterton, Thomas: The Copernican System "These are Thy wondrous works, First Source of Good // Now more admired in being understood."
  • Clough, Arthur Hugh: Dipsychus, II, v: The scene begins with a solar-system metaphor; the last lines of the previous scene also allude to astronomy, and there other similar references scattered through the play.
  • Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Spots in the Sun A metaphor.
  • Däubler, Theodor: Das Nordlicht An epic poem which is both a critique of technological society and the elaboration of a pseudo-scientific mythology involving the aurora, lava-pools, and the sun.
  • Hamilton, William Rowan: Ode To The Moon Under Total Eclipse
  • Hardy, Thomas: At a Lunar Eclipse So that shadow is the Earth's?!
  • Hogg, James: The Morning Star, or the Steam-Boat of Alloa
  • Housman, A. E.: Revolution (West and Away) Uses a vivid depiction of the earth's motion in space to convey a pessimistic view of the world.
  • Keats, John: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer: contains an allusion to Herschel's discovery of Uranus.
  • Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Prometheus Unbound, Act IV
  • Smith, Horace: The Sun's Eclipse -- July 8th, 1842
  • Taylor, Bert Leston: To A Well-Known Globe: "Gyrate, old Top, and let who will be clever."
  • Tennyson: Locksley Hall Sixty Years After Including remarks on how the Earth might appear from space.
  • Tennyson: Move Eastward, Happy Earth
  • Tighe, Mary: The Eclipse of January 24, 1804
  • Todd, Mabel Loomis: Valedictory Lines to A1, the train that carried the Amherst eclipse-observing expedition.
  • Turner, Herbert Hall: Astronomers We: Doggerel about an eclipse expedition to Hokkaido. The Coronet was a ship.
  • Very, Jones: The Zodiacal Light Mentions several theories of its origin.
  • Wordsworth, William: The Eclipse of the Sun, 1820 as the poet witnessed it.
  • Wordsworth, William: To the Planet Venus, Upon its Approximation to the Earth, Jan. 1838: "Science advances with gigantic strides // But are we aught enriched in love and meekness ?"
  • Wynne, Annette: The Sea That Comes to Meet My Hand One of Wynne's many round-earther poems.

• ASTRONOMY: Stars and Nebulæ
  • Anonymous: The Little Star "Scintillate, scintillate, globule orific."
  • Baker, Karle Wilson: Altair Not terribly scientific, but the only poem we have seen about the Summer Triangle asterism!
  • Bryant, William Cullen: Hymn to the North Star Could easily have been written in pre-Copernican times.
  • Däubler, Theodor: Millionen Nachtigallen schlagen. Meaning the stars, possibly.
  • Dickinson, Emily: Arcturus
  • Emerson, Edwin, Sr.: To the Star Sirius One of the many Long Nineteenth Century poems arguing that scientific discovery actually adds to the wonder of the world.
  • Foley, J. W.: The Unrest of Knowledge Comic version of the (very real) depressing effect that pessimistic cosmological speculations had on Late Victorian thought.
  • May, Julia Harris: A Star Can Be as Perfect as a Sun A somewhat geocentric "song from the woods of Maine".
  • Poe, Edgar Allen: Al Aaraaf Mythologises Tycho's nova.
  • Rossetti, Christina: Later Life, Sonnet 9: Sirius and Polaris ... are in harmony despite their disparate (geocentric) locations.
  • Serviss, Garrett P.: The Nebula is Coming! Song featured in the end-of-the-world tale The Second Deluge. The novel describes a collision (which the singers unwisely refuse to take seriously) between the Earth and a spiral nebula -- assumed in 1912 to be a fairly small object, not a galaxy!
  • Seward, Anna: Ode to the Sun
  • Smith, Clark Ashton: A Song of the Stars
  • Smith, Clark Ashton: To the Sun
  • Stephens, J. Burton: The Dark Companion A star too dim to be directly observed (an important research subject for Victorian astronomers) as theological metaphor.

• SCIENTISTS: Astronomers
  • Hamilton, William Rowan: On Unselfishness In The Pursuit Of Truth And Beauty Subtitled "To Prof. J. C. Adams, Discoverer of Neptune."
  • Rawnsley, Hardwicke Drummond: John Couch Adams the discoverer of Neptune: "In his narrow room ... he searched the Heavens and found a world."
  • Holmes, Oliver Wendell: A Welcome to Dr Benjamin Apthorp Gould ... "... On His Return from South America after Fifteen Years Devoted to Cataloguing the Stars of the Southern Hemisphere, Read at the Dinner Given at the Hotel Vendome, May 6, 1885." Holmes specialised in this sort of poem, which is part of the reason he isn't much read these days. For an interesting account of the dinner in question, see Nature 33, 9 (1885).
  • Forster, Thomas: Philosophical Breakfast Song "Come hasten to breakfast at Trinity College // For Herschel and Forster and Babbage and all // Are bringing their porridge // Their wit and their knowledge // From each learned college // And each learned hall."
  • Hamilton, William Rowan: Recollections Of Collingwood The Herschels' house in Kent. The first of the two sonnets apparently survives only as a fragment. The second is quite remarkable for its reference (in 1846!) to "how the One of Time, of Space the Three // Might in the Chain of Symbol girdled be."
  • Hamilton, William Rowan: In Ely Cathedral A prayer for the ecclesiastical unity of the British Isles, inspired by an occasion when Hamilton (an Irishman), John Herschel (an Englishman), and James Forbes (a Scotsman) worshipped together in Ely. The same incident inspired Herschel's poem, On a Scene in Ely Cathedral.
  • Hamilton, William Rowan: To Sir John Herschel On His Return From The Cape Hail, the conquering hero cometh.
  • Noyes, Alfred: William Herschel Conducts
  • Noyes, Alfred: Sir John Herschel Remembers
  • Holmes, Oliver Wendell: Benjamin Peirce: Astronomer, Mathematician A dominant figure in American science for much of the 1800s, Peirce is better known today as the father of the logician Charles Peirce.
  • Thompson, Francis: A Dead Astronomer Despite the somewhat off-putting title, a tribute to the distinguished Jesuit astronomer Stephen Perry.
  • Sylvester, J. J.: Sonnet to the Savilian Professor, Charles Pritchard With a follow-up note by the author, correcting the text.
  • Hamilton, William Rowan: Parsonstown Sonnet No. 1 "Written in the upper gallery of the great telescope." Lord Rosse's telescope, "the Leviathan of Parsonstown", was one of the great scientific instruments of the Nineteenth Century.
  • Doyle, Sir Francis Hastings: Short Analysis of The Plurality of Worlds Famous joke about the Trinity College cosmologist William Whewell.
  • Taylor, Tom: On the Death of Whewell An elegy for the great philosopher, cosmologist, and Master of Trinity, rather oddly described as a "sledge-hammer smiter in body and brain ... right kin of Thor".