Stars
Lines by an American poet, first gathered in a 1920 collection.
Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,And a heaven full of stars
Over my head,
White and topaz
And misty red;Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
That aeons
Cannot vex or tire;Up the dome of heaven
Like a great hill,
I watch them marching
Stately and still,And I know that I
Am honored to be
Witness
Of so much majesty."Stars" — Sara Teasdale, from Flame and Shadow (1920)
Sara Teasdale grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where she was born in 1884, and she divided much of her writing life between there and New York.[1] Her collection Love Songs received the Columbia University Poetry Prize in 1918, an honor later reorganized as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.[1]
The poem printed here belongs to Flame and Shadow, the volume the Macmillan Company issued in 1920.[2]
The Starry Night
An oil painting of a village at night beneath a sky of swirling, star-filled brushwork.
Vincent van Gogh made this view while living at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had admitted himself in 1889.[1] He worked chiefly in oil, and this canvas dates to June of that year.[1]
The painting entered the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.[2]
The Great Nebula in Orion
A hand-colored plate of the Orion nebula, drawn from telescope studies.
Étienne Léopold Trouvelot was born in France in 1827 and settled in the United States, where the director of the Harvard College Observatory invited him to render celestial subjects during the 1870s.[2] He produced thousands of astronomical drawings by hand over the following years.[2]
Charles Scribner's Sons published fifteen of these images as chromolithographs in 1881 and 1882, and the New York Public Library holds a set among its collections.[1]