My favorite poem is probably In the Field by Richard Wilbur. Because it says that even though the universe itself be finite and mutable and not-for-ever, there is something stronger in the human heart. Wilbur and his wife go out one night in the field near their house to see the stars, and then again the next morning.
This fieldgrass brushed our legs last night,
as out we stumbled, looking up,
wading, as in the cloudy dregs,
of a wide sparkling cup--
our thrown back heads aswim
in the grand, kept appointments of the air,
save where a pine, at the sky's rim,
took something from the Bear.
Black, in her glinting chains,
Andromeda feared nothing from the seas--
preserved as by no hero's pains,
or hushed Euripedes'.
And there the Dolphin glowed,
still thrashing through a diamond froth of stars,
flawless, as when Arion rode
one of its avatars.
But none of that was true!
What shapes that Greece or Babylon discerned
had time not slowly drawn askew,
or like cat's cradles turned?
And did we not recall
that Egypt's north was in the Dragon's tail?
As if a form of type should fall
and dash itself like hail,
the heavens jumped away,
bursting the cincture of the Zodiac!
Shot flares, with nothing left to say
to us, not coming back,
unless they should at last,
like hard-flung dice that ramble out the throw,
be gathered for another cast.
Whether that might be so
we could not say, but trued
our talk awhile to words of the real sky,
chatting of class and magnitude,
star clusters, nebulae,
and how Antares, huge
as Mars' big roundhouse swing, was fled
as in some rimless centrifuge
into a blink of red.
It was the nip of fear
that told us when imagination caught
the feel of what we said, came near
the schoolbook thoughts we thought.
Then, in the late-night chill,
we turned and picked our way through outcrop stone,
by faint starlight, up the hill
to where our bed-lamp shone.
Today, in the same field,
the sun takes all, and what could lie beyond?
Those holes in heaven have been sealed
like raindrills in a pond.
And we, beheld in gold,
see nothing starry but these galaxies
of flowers, dense and and manifold,
that rise about our knees:
white daisy-drifts, where you
sink down to pick an armload as we pass,
sighting the heal-all's minor blue
in chasms of the grass,
and wisps of hawkweed, where
amidst the reds and yellows as they burn,
a few dead polls commit to air
the seeds of their return.
We could no doubt mistake
these flowers for some answer to that fright
we felt for all creation's sake
in our dark talk last night.
Taking to heart what came
from the heart's wish for life, which, staking here
in the least field an endless claim
beats on from sphere to sphere,
and pounds beyond the sun,
where nothing less preemptory can go,
and is ourselves, and is the one
unbounded thing we know.
