Description
Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit, The sky is, up above the roof, Si bleu, si calme! So blue, so calm! Un arbre, par-dessus Je toit, A tree there, up above the roof, Berce sa palme. Waves leaves of palm. La cloche, dans le ciel qu’on voit, A church bell, in the sky I see, Doucement tinte. Softly tolls. Un oiseau, sur l’arbre qu’on voit, A bird, upon the tree I see, Chante sa plainte. Sadly calls. PAUL VERLAINE Like Verlaine, we are in prison. The prison is our Earth, “which is so pretty”; our atmosphere and its clouds, its “marvellous clouds”. (You would think that Verlaine, Prevert and Baudelaire had been comparing notes!) The sky is up above the roof… A tree there, up above the roof… Stars in the sky, like birds … their rays, like bells (and here we are with Apollinaire!) What we see opens the way to what we guess at; what we observe Ieads us towards the unobservable. A poem releases images, and the invisible grows big with reality. Astronomcrs are a little like poets (indirectly from the Greek 7tostco, make): they make the universe by interpreting messages, extrapolating spectra, and inventing ‘models’ of the cosmos or of stars – fictional constructions whose observable part constitutes only a small fraction of the whole, and which only the inductive logic of the theoretician allows us to consider as representing unique physical reality.
