And if longing seizes you for sailing the stormy seas,
when the Pleiades flee mighty Orion
and plunge into the misty deep
and all the gusty winds are raging,
then do not keep your ship on the wine-dark sea
but, as I bid you, remember to work the land.
— Works and Days
Midnight Poem
The moon has gone
The Pleiades gone
In dead of night
Time passes on
I lie alone.
-Sappho
Sappho was a Greek poetess. She observed rise and setting of Krittikas and wrote this poem 2500 years ego.
Evening in a Sugar Orchard
From where I lingered in a lull in march
outside the sugar-house one night for choice,
I called the fireman with a careful voice
And bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch:
‘O fireman, give the fire another stoke,
And send more sparks up chimney with the smoke. ‘
I thought a few might tangle, as they did,
Among bare maple boughs, and in the rare
Hill atmosphere not cease to glow,
And so be added to the moon up there.
The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show
On every tree a bucket with a lid,
And on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow.
The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.
They were content to figure in the trees As Leo,
Orion, and the Pleiades.
And that was what the boughs were full of soon.
-Robert Frost
Pleiades
This small, beautiful fruit
tantalizes every taste
bud blooming on my tongue.
Sweetly the juices take over,
the feeling tremendously sinful,
transcending luscious bliss
-Craig Tigerman
The Pleiades
LAST night I saw the Pleiades again,
Faint as a drift of steam
From some tall chimney-stack;
And I remembered you as you were then:
Awoke dead worlds of dream,
And Time turned slowly back.
I saw the Pleiades through branches bare,
And close to mine your face
Soft glowing in the dark;
For Youth and Hope and Love and You were there
At our dear trysting-place
In that bleak London park.
And as we kissed the Pleiades looked down
From their immeasurable
Aloofness in cold Space.
Do you remember how a last leaf brown
Between us flickering fell
Soft on your upturned face?
Last night I saw the Pleiades again,
Here in the alien South,
Where no leaves fade at all;
And I remembered you as you were then,
And felt upon my mouth
Your leaf-light kisses fall!
The Pleiades remember and look down
On me made old with grief,
Who then a young god stood,
When you-now lost and trampled by the Town,
A lone wind-driven leaf,-
Were young and sweet and good!
– Arthur Henry Adams
