Some said it was a shooting star,
Some said it was a pheasant;
It was the most surprising thing
To villager and peasant.
To see it floating and shining there
Over the alps of snow –
Some said it was a bubble of air,
The others they said no;
It could not be just snow or cloud
Or any such phenomenon,
It could not be a water spout,
At least it was no common one
For they could see a shape inside
That stood too straight and tall
To be a weed or fish caught up –
If it was there at all.
Some said it was a man in a bottle,
But they had drunk too well;
Some said it was a shining spirit
Released from heaven or hell;
Some said it was a thing from Mars
And some the man in the moon;
And some said it was Professor Piccard
Ascending in his balloon.
His bright blue eyes were filled with heaven,
His hair like wisps of cloud,
And straight like an exclamation mark
In the high noon he stood.
And up and up to the stratosphere,
Always sublimely vertical,
Ten miles above the earth he rose
In his astounding vehicle.
What is the colour of outer space
Above the mountain snows?
Purple and violet, sombre, deep –
But look, down down he goes;
He will not sleep in the stars tonight
Or camp on Augsberg’s peaks;
Seventeen hundred fathoms down
Another world he seeks,
And hardly pausing to change his craft
Or see that it is safe
Down to the Ponza Deep he dives
In his strange bathyscaphe.
The yellow light dies out in green,
The green dies out in purple
And all in utter blackness now
Swim round him the sea’s people,
The shadowy fish with bulging eyes
The flying phosphorescence,
The mighty shapes that loom in the shades
That never have known man’s presence.
But now they know for here he comes
As radiant and orbicular
The bathyscaphe sinks with Piccard inside
Proud, calm and perpendicular.
Oh like a bubble of living sunlight
Down to the bottom they plunge
Where the specks of jelly drift in the murk
And silently breathes the sponge.
From the top of the sky to the bottom of the sea .
How much I wish I were able
To set Professor Piccard now
In his appropriate fable:
How like some mythological hero
Down in that shuddering dark
He wrestled for life with an octopus
Or fought with a giant shark;
How some great lumbering whale or ray
Mistaking him for Jonah
Loomed from the shadowy fog and swallowed
The bathyscaphe and its owner;
Or how like some new Orpheus
Wandering through dim Hades
He saw the queen of the mermaids there
Surrounded by all her ladies
And up and up she followed him,
Divinely fishy and fair,
Out from the dark and the purple gloom
To the breaking wave and the air,
Until at last as the bathyscaphe
Rose bubbling out of the water
The professor yearned for his gleaming prize
And so looked back and lost her.
Or how when he rose up and flew
High to the sun like Icarus
Down from that light he fell, he fell
Through space as black as licorice.
Or like some modem saint, more happily,
Soaring in his uprightness
He felt in his strange globular car
A lift, a sudden lightness,
And saw bright angels wafting him,
Their feathers soft as pullets,
Impervious to cosmic rays
And meteorites like bullets,
To his celestial home. Alas,
He did not see one feather
But studied in the stratosphere
The cosmic rays and the weather;
And when he dived to the floor of the sea
All eager though he stood,
The bathyscaphe half-buried itself
And he saw nothing but mud.
Yet when I think how from that deep
Where life first moved and nickered
His craft rose up like some great egg
And hatched Professor Piccard,
When I reflect how his brave stance
Of perpendicularity
In posture and in motion both
Is man’s whole singularity,
Who rose from that same depth and stood
And climbs on to infinity,
He seems more legendary now
Than any old divinity;
And up towards the stars of heaven
Or down to look at zero
I leave Professor Piccard now,
Our emblem and our hero.
(Douglas Alexander Stewart)
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Based on Topics: Man Poems, Heaven Poems, Fairness Poems, Kings & Queens Poems, Home Poems, Water Poems, People Poems, Snow Poems, Hell Poems, Heroism Poems, Weather PoemsBased on Keywords: astounding, fishy, stance, exclamation, mistaking, perpendicular, octopus, icarus, phenomenon, half-buried, villager