The Star Dial

The Star Dial

By Willa Cather

 

Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα

καὶ Πληΐαδες 

          —Sappho*

 

When the moon was high I waited,

   Pale with evening’s tints it shone;

When its gold came slow, belated,

   Still I kept my watch alone

 

When it sank, a golden wonder,

   From my window still I bent,

Though the clouds hung thick with thunder

   Where our hilltop roadway went.

 

By the cypress tops I’ve counted

   Every golden star that passed;

Weary hours they’ve shone and mounted,

   Each more tender than the last.

 

All my pillows hot with turning,

   All my weary maids asleep;

Every star in heaven was burning

   For the tryst you did not keep.

 

Now the clouds have hushed their warning,

   Paleness creeps upon the sea;

One star more, and then the morning—

   Share, oh, share that star with me!

 

Never fear that I shall chide thee

   For the wasted stars of night,

So thine arms will come and hide me

   From the dawn’s unwelcome light.

 

Though the moon a heav’n had given us,

   Every star a crown and throne,

Till the morn apart had driven us—

   Let the last star be our own.

 

Ah! the cypress tops are sighing

   With the wind that brings the day;

There my last pale treasure dying

   Ebbs in jeweled light away;

 

Ebbs like water bright, untasted;

   Black the cypress, bright the sea;

Heav’n’s whole treasury lies wasted

   And the dawn burns over me.

 

* He showed up with a seal and Pliiades

 

 

About this Poem

 

“The Star Dial” appeared in McClure’s, vol. 30, no. 2 (December 1907). In “‘The Thing Not Named’: Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer,” published in Signs, vol. 9, no. 4, (Summer 1984), Sharon O’Brien, adjunct faculty in creative writing at Dickinson College, argues that “[i]n Sappho, [Willa Cather] found a poet who celebrated the delights and agonies of love between women. Cather read Sappho during her college years and in 1907 wrote ‘The Star Dial,’ a poem revealing her identification with this literary and sexual foremother as she assumes Sappho’s voice [. . .]. Evidently Sappho’s poetry formed a bond between Cather and Louise [Pound], for Cather refers to her verse in one of [their] letters; understandably the two young women were drawn to this poet of ‘love and maidens’ where they found their own experience of romantic love mirrored.” Expanding on O’Brien’s argument in his book Sappho: ]fragments (Punctum Books, 2018), Jonathan Goldberg, former Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Emory University, writes, “Fragment 168B [in Eva-Maria Voigt’s edition of Sappho’s poetry] lies behind the poem: ‘Moon has set / and Pleiades: middle / night, the hour goes by, / alone I lie.’ In Cather’s poem, her speaker waits for a lover who never appears as a dawn arises that would, in any case, have necessitated their separation. Theirs is a secret love; although no gender is explicit, the fourth stanza of Cather’s light-drenched nocturne is particularly sapphic [. . .]. She burns to the end of the poem.”

 

About this Poet

 

Willa Cather was born in Virginia on December 7, 1873. Her family moved to Nebraska in 1883, ultimately settling in the town of Red Cloud, where the National Willa Cather Center is located today. She attended the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

 

Cather moved to Pittsburgh in 1896 to pursue a career in journalism and work for the women’s magazine Home Monthly. After a few years, she took a break to teach high school English and focus on her creative writing. In 1903, she published her first book, April Twilights (The Gorham Press), a collection of poems, and began writing and publishing short stories. In 1906, she moved to New York City to take an editorial position at McClure’s Magazine, where she worked until 1911, then left to focus again on her creative writing. 

 

Cather is the author of twenty books and best known for her works of fiction, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (Alfred A. Knopf, 1927); One of Ours (Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), which won the Pulitzer Prize; My Antonia (Houghton Mifflin, 1918); and O, Pioneers! (Houghton Mifflin, 1913).

 

Cather was awarded a gold medal in fiction by the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944. She died in New York City on April 24, 1947, and is memorialized at the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.