Each day this week, the Book Review will present a new essay, game and series of celebrity readings designed to help you memorize a delightful poem. Gregory Cowles is the Book Review’s poetry editor. Dear readers, Poets have been turning their eyes to the heavens for a long time, from Psalm 147 (“He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name”) to Ada Limón (“we read the sky as if it is an unerring book / of the universe”). And — on his birthday! — let’s not forget William Shakespeare, who in “Hamlet” wrote that “the stars are fire.” That’s lit. As you might expect from poets, all this stargazing has less to do with astrophysics than it does with a finely honed sense of wonder. In our Poetry Challenge this week, we’ve talked about how W.H. Auden let the night sky stand in for his fickle beloved, but he undoubtedly also had religion on the mind. There’s a way you can read “The More Loving One” as a believer’s profession of faith in an unfeeling or absentee God — and, more than that, as an argument for the necessity of faith itself. The language of love and the language of religion often overlap: In a relationship we are both worshiped and worshiper, and Auden here is making the case for devotion, for commitment in the face of the unknown, in romance and in religion and in life. Heck, maybe even in astrophysics. Today’s portion of the Poetry Challenge turns to the cosmos via the fourth and final stanza of Auden’s poem, with its intimations of an empty sky and its slightly panicked yearning to find the “total dark sublime.” I’ve memorized the whole thing by now — have you? — but as for unpacking all of its resonant meanings, well, this might take me a little time.
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