Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.

—From The Hashish Eater by Clark Ashton Smith

 

The Cosmic Comedy

What is this mad sight before you?

Incarnate speck of star dust,
Animate ash of stellar fires,
Cinder of the Cosmos
Shaking its fist at the sky.

Some outraged atoms,
Unamused by the cosmic joke
That has imprisoned them there upon a mote,
Spinning, helpless in the void.

An ant upon a cosmic carousel
Turning through space and time,
An extra in an unknown drama
Upon a stage too big for its mind.

—Zoren James (aka “The Cosmist”)

 

What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?

—from “Vastness” by Alfred Tennyson

 

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

—From Auguries of Innocence by William Blake

 

I stood and stared; the sky was lit,
The sky was stars all over it,
I stood, I knew not why,
Without a wish, without a will,
I stood upon that silent hill
And stared into the sky until
My eyes were blind with stars and still
I stared into the sky.

—from “Song of Honor” by Ralph Hodgson

 

Unknowingly, we plow the dust of stars, blown about us by the wind, and drink the universe in a glass of rain.

—Ihab Hassan

Split the atom’s heart, and lo!
Within it thou wilt find a sun.

—Persian Mystic Poem

 

Planet Caravan

We sail through endless skies
stars shine like eyes
the black night sighs
The moon in silver trees
falls down in tears
light of the night
The earth, a purple blaze
of sapphire haze
in orbit always

While down below the trees
bathed in cool breeze
silver starlight breaks down the night
And so we pass on by the crimson eye
of great god Mars
as we travel the universe

—Geezer Butler (Black Sabbath)

 

Alone in space, I view’d a feeble fleck
Of silvern light, marking the narrow ken
Which mortals call the boundless universe.
On ev’ry side, each as a tiny star,
Shone more creations, vaster than our own,
And teeming with unnumber’d forms of life;
Though we as life would recognize it not,
Being bound to earthy thoughts of human mould.
As on a moonless night the Milky Way
In solid sheen displays its countless orbs
To weak terrestrial eyes, each orb a sun;
So beam’d the prospect on my wond’ring soul;
A spangled curtain, rich with twinkling gems,
Yet each a mighty universe of suns.

—From The Poe-et’s Nightmare by H. P. Lovecraft