PLATO’S TIMAEUS AND THE INNER LIFE OF STARS
RICHARD L. POSS
Humanities Program, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721
ABSTRACT. Stars have the paradoxical quality of being located both at the farthest reaches of the universe and
deep inside our innermost selves. This paper examines the dynamics of the “inner” and “outer” in the poetic treatment
of stars, beginning with the classic statement of this relationship in Plato’s Timaeus. In contemporary American
poetry, stars initiate a transcending of the self and a melding with Nature. Stellar imagery reunites humanity with an
expanded Nature that includes the findings of modern astronomy, and thus renegotiates the border between the poetic
and scientific worlds.
1. Plato’s Timaeus
“And when He had compounded the whole He divided it into souls equal in number to the
stars, and each soul He assigned to one star.” So Plato in the Timaeus (1999) presents a
mythic narrative in which the world is created by a craftsman-deity who establishes a
correspondence between the large scale structure of the universe and the inner life of the
individual human being. Although the creator-deity is not a theologically coherent God, the
model will influence the development of both Neoplatonism and early Christianity. Our souls
come from the stars, and return to the stars when we are done on earth. “And he that has lived
his appointed time well shall return again to his abode in his native star, and shall gain a life
that is blessed and congenial.” No surprise then, that the figure of Plato in Raphael’s “School
of Athens” holds a copy of the Timaeus in one hand while with the other he points upward
(the famous High Renaissance gesture used elsewhere by both Raphael and Leonardo) toward
his “native star,” and, by extension, to the world of Platonic forms. Together, the book and the
gesture indicate that the end of philosophy is to complete this circuit and return to the divine
origin of the soul, which is a star. Poetic images work through imagination rather than
demonstration, and Plato does not provide a proof of this notion but is content to offer it as a
suggestion. If the poetic image rings true with the reader, then seeing the stars would be a
reminder that our role in the universe might be integral to the function and process of the
cosmos, and that something of the “heavenly” nature of stars remains in us, to be brought out
by poetry. The Platonic inheritance suggests the spiritual nature of stars, the joining of stars
with human souls, the transmigration of souls, and divine intention to the design of creation.
Plato’s myth stands against those models which would account for the nature of the
universe in purely material terms. It enunciates a preference for the mystical but also for the
ideal, for a world of forms, and thus for the more abstract operations of reason, mathematics,
and logic. The star and the human soul were one, are now separated, and long to be reunited.
Astronomy, poetry, and music are all efforts to achieve reunification. We look out on the
night sky and recognize within us the kinship we have with the stars. Plato’s myth suggests
that when stars are used in poetry to symbolize the unchangeable, the ideal, and the true, we
are resonating with our primordial origins.
2.
Stellar Imagery
Images of stars are frequently used in poetry to symbolize ideals which contrast with
ordinary human experience, individual or social (Poss, 1994). When the Romantic poet John
Keats (1980) writes in the famous sonnet, “Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art,” he
expresses a universal desire to rise above the changing weather of human circumstance and be
like those unchanging lights. When, in contemplating his mortality, Keats writes in another
famous sonnet, “And when I see upon the night’s starred face / Huge cloudy symbols of a
high romance,” we are thrust out in an open-ended array of possibilities, of trajectories of plot
and narrative suggestive of feudal glory and chivalric romance. The sudden rush of awareness
that accompanies these lines comes from the clouds which are symbols of an even higher
romance, of great passions and risks. The passions are unspecific, as yet unwritten by the
poet, and when they are written it will only be the “shadows” which are “traced.” Keats can
with one phrase allude to the entire literature of chivalric romance, to the courtly love
tradition and its Petrarchan successors.
The Platonic elements in the Petrarchan tradition were enormous, and contained the same
preference for the ideal forms. Sir Phillip Sidney’s (1969) sequence of love sonnets is called
“Astrophel and Stella” (Star-lover and Star), and sonnet 48 begins with the seemingly
artificial Petrarchan conceit of love coming from the eyes of the Lady like the light of two
stars: “Soul’s joy, bend not those morning stars from me / Where virtue is made strong by
beauty’s might.” Here the combination of burning sexuality, idealized love, sublimated
eroticism along with open fanning of the flames, all mix together deliciously in this sonnet
which is a meditation on the moment-by-moment experience of passion and forbearance, of
self-conscious torment unexpressed and unfulfilled: “Where love is chasteness, pain does
learn delight / And humbleness grows one with majesty.” That Platonism runs through
Petrarchan poetic conventions is hardly surprising, except to remind us that objects in the
material world are real only insofar as they “shadow” or imitate an independent realm of
immutable essences. The poet cherishes the more direct access to that realm in Stella’s eyes,
and this draws him back for more glimpses, momentary flashes of ideal truth, which
strengthen him to withstand more (“pain does learn delight”), resulting in a spiritual paradox
not unlike that experienced by religious devotees in the Middle Ages (“humbleness grows one
with majesty”).
These traditional forms are disrupted by the more direct and visionary poetry of William
Blake (1979), where the insistent directness of “Cloud, Meteor, & Star, / Are Men Seen Afar”
concentrates the elements of an early pantheism in a prophetic voice. The uncompromising
quality of this poetic utterance remade our conception of the world at a time when the great
strides of science and industrialism in the early 19 th Century seemed to deny any escape from
a mechanistic view of the universe. More disruptive still are the surrealistic images of Dylan
Thomas (1953), whose stars oscillate between several realms of consciousness, none of them
susceptible to definition: “I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind / how time has ticked a heaven
around the stars.” The strength of Thomas’ vigorous and complex imagery is that it pulls the
reader along with it even when the meaning is problematic and contradictory. Even those lines
which are conventionally “romantic” resonate with the orientation of the Timaeus: “in her
arms at long and dear last / I may without fail / Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.”
The fulfillment of love is described as a reunification with the primordial beginnings of the
cosmos, rendered in terms of the birth of stars. At other times he leaps and flies about the
cosmos alternating between terrestrial and heavenly realms: “I fled the earth and, naked,
climbed the weather, / Reaching a second ground far from the stars; / And there we wept, I
and a ghostly other.” Here the poet departs from the usual dichotomy between “earth” and
“star” by introducing a “second ground.” The classical technique of surrealism was always to
juxtapose completely unlike things, so that the clash of these violently opposed images would
produce in the viewer a mental shock which in turn would generate an apprehension of the
infinite, of the absolute. While Dylan Thomas’ poetry is not susceptible to linear allegorical
treatment, the shadows of the Timaeus still appear in his association of stars with love and the
memory of an ancient kinship.
3. Contemporary American Poetry
One might expect the ideals of Neoplatonism to flourish in the Renaissance and be
manipulated for effect in subsequent periods, but the same thematic material bequeathed by
the Timaeus resonates in contemporary American poetry as well. Modern astronomers often
discuss the mind-boggling vastness of the expanding universe (Sagan, 1995), but usually with
a mechanistic interpretation of this vastness built-in. We are to understand that the large size
of the numbers involved stands as a refutation of quaint human aspirations. While Romantics
like Keats deny this interpretation outright, the 20 th century poet is more likely to bring his
poetic understanding to bear on the vastness of the material cosmos and make it the object of
this inquiry. Robert Francis’ poem “Astronomer” (1976) is remarkable because he declines to
force an anthropic interpretation on the material. To come to terms with the immensity of the
universe as a human, his astronomer must move beyond the human, and when he does it is not
clear what he finds: “Far far / Beyond the stargazer / The astronomer / Who does not try / To
make the sky / His sky / But goes out of his mind / To find / Beyond.” The staccato rhythmic
breaks in the short lines accompany the suggestion of ambivalence towards science. The poet
is willing to pay the price for knowledge (“goes out of his mind”) and accept the changes it
will make in his personality. He will live here with the implications of what is truly out there,
without bending it or putting a nice face on it. The poet’s admiration for the astronomer is
partly ironic and the sardonic final lines leave his position unresolved, constructing the image
of the astronomer as the quintessential modern man, whose humanity is compromised and
reformulated by scientific discovery.
If poetic images of the stars carry us out to the frontiers of the universe in Robert Francis’
poem, they carry us backward in history to the mythical origins of humanity in Robert Bly’s
“Looking at the Stars.” (1997) Here the poet recalls the stars as narratives, as stories of the
mythical figures of constellations (“Chair,” “Dog,” “Hunter”). Conscious of his role as an
aging parent, he feels the need to have his children with him as he gazes up at the sky, “Eight
thousand years later,” and still we carry in our bones the memory of these myths which are
inseparable from the stars themselves. The stars are reminders of our collective human
heritage, of our spiritual origins. It is a memory which dissolves the autonomous self in the
flow of time (“I can no longer tell where I begin and leave off”), in the astronomical poems of
Kenneth Rexroth (1956), and ushers in a zen-like melding with the natural world. In “The
Heart of Heracles,” another poem which begins with a meditation on the figures of
constellations, the poet is enabled through concentration on the stars to transcend the physical
and touch upon a consciousness beyond the human, a self-reflective awareness of the totality:
“the swarming stars / Have an eye that sees itself.” Kinship with the stars appears in the
nature poetry of the American west as much as in the poetry of Keats or Blake. But here the
commitment to precise observation of the natural world creates a richer texture of imagery, of
concrete detail. And although the claims of pantheism or divinity in nature are subtle and
understated, they are no less important. Even when it is daylight, the presence of the unseen
stars influences the religious experience of the poet. The lines “I come into the presence of
still water / and I feel above me the day-blind stars” in Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild
Things” (1968) suggests sacred associations but gently, without fanfare: “I rest in the grace of
the world, and am free.”
Whether the stars are invoked to reinforce religion or deny it, to proclaim ideals or to
enhance despair, they integrate a kind of vastness which comes from modern knowledge of
their size and distance. By enfolding the image of stars into a poem, we incorporate this
immensity and thereby expand the capacity of the human to acknowledge the nonhuman.
Mary Oliver’s (1979) nature poetry makes use of the findings of contemporary science but
without any loss of vigor or freshness in her conception of the robustness of the current poetic
posture toward the larger universe. Camping at night, lying under the sky, the poet
experiences a succession of levels of unification with the larger physical world, “Nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars / But my thoughts.” The pantheist influence of the
Romantics is still present but within a context of contemporary observation of the natural
world. The willingness to accept the mystical and visionary dimensions of poetry empowers
the creative imagination and enables the poet to reaffirm kinship with the stars and to effect a
reunion of the living universe with the living poet. “By morning / I had vanished at least a
dozen times / into something better.”
4. Conclusion
Stars shine at the frontier of the poet’s world, now no less than in Plato’s time. The paradox
lies in the resonance, the sympathetic vibration of stars so that they reveal the innermost and
the outermost realms of the poet’s world simultaneously. While the mythic narrative of the
Timaeus is not the only place where the theme of stars-as-souls occurs in antiquity, it has for
various reasons remained a central locus for these ideas. The tendency of poets to position
stars at the outer limits of human experience allows us to use stellar imagery as a measure of
the relationship between the poetic and the scientific worlds in any given period.
Contemporary American poets, having accepted the pantheist inheritance from English
Romanticism, have nevertheless expanded the scope of poetry to include all the manifold
varieties of experience in the natural world. Even when the poet accepts a materialist
interpretation of existence, the images of stars still have the power to evoke powerful
emotions which deepen the existential chill that runs through much of modern poetry. Modern
science combines with modern poetry to produce startling images of concrete details which
are still intimately connected to stellar evolution: “To imagine stars and flaming / dust
wheeling inside the gut / of a blind, transparent fish / swimming out-of-sight in the black /
waters of a cave a thousand years ago.” These lines by Pattiann Rogers (1994) show the
robust energy with which stellar imagery is employed in contemporary American poetry.
What has been achieved is a new relationship with nature that incorporates astronomy and
evolution. This is a kind of poetry which is scientifically literate, devoid of sentimentalism,
but rich in imagination and lyrical yearning. It is knowledgeable and assured, but still
energetic and robust. The role of stars in this poetry is to confront the latest findings of
astronomy with the most ancient mythic narratives, and to fuse the two in a mutually
beneficial union.
References
Berry, Wendell: 1968, “The Peace of Wild Things” in Openings, 30.
Blake, William: 1979 Blake’s Poetry and Designs Ed. M. L. Johnson and J. E. Grant, 555.
Bly, Robert: 1997 “Looking at the Stars” in Morning Poems, 81.
Keats, John: 1982 The Complete Poems, Ed. J. Barnard, 221, 452.
Oliver, Mary: 1979 “Sleeping in the Forest” in Twelve Moons, 3.
Plato: Timaeus 41E, 1999, in R. G. Bury, Ed., Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus,
Epistles, 90-93.
Poss, R.: 1995, “Whitman’s ‘Learn’d Astronomer’ and the Poetry of Stars,” Vistas in
Astronomy 39, 615-22.
Rexroth, K.: 1956, “The Heart of Heracles,” Collected Shorter Poems, 238.
Rogers, Pattiann: 1994 “Good Heavens” in Firekeeper, 183.
Sagan, C.: 1995, Cosmos, 4-14.
Sidney, Sir Philip: 1969 Selected Prose and Poetry, Ed. R. Kimbrough, 189.
Thomas, Dylan: 1953 “I Fellowed Sleep” and “Love in the Asylum” in Collected Poems
1934- 1952, 31 and 119.