Twinkle, twinkle, little star: Cosmology and the composition of verse

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24-05-2025

Knowing someone on the field as a fellow cricketer is one thing. So too becoming privy to his engaging forays into Maharashtrian antiquities. Quite something else it is to listen to Professor Girish Kulkarni of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research giving a public lecture on the properties of the Universe in its first billion years.
Among Girish Kulkarni's beguiling analogies and metaphors, I am particularly struck by his comparison of the way the further you venture out into space, that is also, given the speed of light, back in time, what is known becomes more fragmentary in the way archaeologists digging down under a modern city usually find fewer remains as they go until there is nothing at all.
To this model or metaphor, apparently, there is one exception. At a certain distant 'epoch' in space, beyond the imagining except in esoteric mathematical formulae, there is a 'zone' so clear it is as if an archaeologist, digging down into ever lower levels, has come upon a city – some lost Harappa or Pompeii – relatively well preserved. This is a surprise and creates a puzzle for cosmologists since it fits ill with the otherwise established pattern of a diminishing series.
History of poetry: 'The Star
As a woolly-minded versifier, I find myself provoked to toy with the possibility of an analogy between this riddle of contemporary cosmology and the surprises that can be thrown up by the composition of verse as well as its history.
First, a historical example. Let me ask a question such as Girish Kulkarni might ask about versification. Which is the most widely known verse of English poetry? Perhaps something by Shakespeare? Or Wordsworth? Or Byron?
Well, that might be so but my own random sample taken from many rambles across the world might suggest by way of answer a verse with which you will surely be familiar. By chance, it is curiously appropriate for cosmology:
'Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are'.
I have found so many people, especially but not exclusively children, from Beijing to Budapest, from Madrid to Montreal, who, even when knowing little English, can recite this verse. I have seen copies of it inscribed on plates and on wall-hangings.
Of course you know this verse, surely we all do, but, since we tend to remember poetry just in fragments, do you remember – I didn't – how it goes on and elaborates on the theme of the twinkling star?
The movement of the verse is tied to a constant refrain of its iconic first line in a way that is common to Indian prosody. It returns to it finally via a line no doubt equally congenial to cosmologists as they confront newer objects of astronomical ignorance such as black holes and dark matter: 'Though I know not what you are, twinkle, twinkle, little star'.
As with much poetry, often assigned for reasons good as well as bad to Anon, you may have forgotten or never known the name of the author of 'The Star'? It is Jane Taylor who, along with her sister Ann, was a phenomenally successful and well-loved writer in the Victorian era and beyond, at home and abroad.
If you have seen the film PK, you may also be surprised to learn that it is indirectly, as stories by Browning and Mark Twain were directly, indebted to another of Jane's works, 'How It Strikes a Stranger'. This moral tale pioneered a genre whereby a stranger from outer space – Jane's from her twinkling Evening Star – arrives on Earth and exposes while experiencing the absurdities of human behaviour. Jane's particular target was Man's greed for wealth and possessions in the face of mortality.
Composition of poetry: The Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám
That it is out of an inchoate chaos the coherent patterns of polished poems are salvaged and constructed may be illustrated by the story of a poem as widely read among free-thinking adults of all classes in late Victorian times as the works of the Taylors were among religious families – pirate editions appearing in India as well as England and America.
To an astronomer and mathematician, Omar Khayyám, is ascribed a series of verses, none or few of which he may have composed at all. These are the Persian versions of rubaiyát better known to us in Edward FitzGerald's English translations – transcreations more like, even occasionally total inventions.
The rubai is, like the ballad, a people's form from the countryside and it is ironic that many of the Persian originals, made available to FitzGerald by his teacher, Edward Byles Cowell, a professor of Sanskrit in (then) Calcutta, were composed in the sophisticated courts of north India.
Whether or not Omar Khayyám ever did toss off a rubai or two at the end of his lectures on science, FitzGerald gathered a selection of the ever increasing number attributed to him and, having first tried some in Latin, tesselated them, as he put it, into a mosaic, stringing the disparate and discrete originals into a coherent sequence they never had – and so providing us with a whole galaxy of twinkling stars.
Readers frequently return the collection to its former fragmented state by singling out a particularly memorable quatrain, perhaps, for example:
'And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky
Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help – for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I'
FitzGerald, who invariably deferred to his – younger – teacher, Professor Cowell, only once rebuffed him and that was to insist on his own more sympathetic rather than his teacher's far more laboured - if faithful – versions of Omariana being published first. In the event the first edition of his Rubaiyát of 'Omar Khayyám (1859) fell dead from the press, the next edition, published curiously in (then) Madras, did no better and FitzGerald died before quatrains from his poem became as familiar as stars in the sky.
Reading poetry: 'The Disillusioned Bride'
If the composition and dissemination of verse is as volatile as anything in the cosmos, the reading of it can also be as various and puzzling. Scroll back towards the beginnings of Jane Taylor's career and one poem attributed to her is so unlike anything else she ever wrote that it is widely supposed it cannot be hers.
The timbered Guildhall Museum in Lavenham once housed an extensive exhibition of works by the Taylor family. A visiting stranger from the 21st century, as if from another star, would have been struck by the difference as well as coherence of their cultural universe. Their tales and verses all have a strictly moral tone. Throughout the long 19th century, these made a substantial contribution to a strain of English-speaking culture that prized domesticity and duty above all else.
The works of the sisters outlived them and they were still superstars of the nursery when an enlarged centenary edition of their Original Poems was published to greet the new century in 1903. Two years later their supernova even survived the threat of collapse into a black hole brought on by their own gravity.
In his Cautionary Tales Hilaire Belloc published a series of hilarious parodies of their verses for children in which particular boys and girls don't simply suffer a bit of retribution as do Ann's Meddlesome Matty and Jane's Dirty Jim but all die in agony – and of course quite ridiculously – for such minor misdemeanours as slamming doors or chewing bits of string.
Perhaps only that alien stranger to the Taylor family exhibition would have been idle or impertinent enough to look behind a door leading out of the room and find hanging there a manuscript poem that simply doesn't fit the picture at all. An adjacent note attributed it to Jane and gave its title as 'The Disillusioned Bride'.
This poem has a newly-married young woman, in twelve increasingly spirited stanzas, berating her husband for growing cool towards her and threatening to leave him if he doesn't pay proper attention to her and her feelings.
Surely the attribution of this poem to Jane has to be misplaced? Jane herself never had a husband. But did she perhaps have had a friend who, like a young woman in a later moral tale she wrote, 'Display', jumped into a showy marriage she soon regretted?
If the subject of Jane's – never published – poem is puzzling, the form of it (pointed up in the title of a second unattributed variant secreted in a Suffolk archive) compounds the puzzle. Jane's poem begins:
'The twentieth week is well nigh past,
Since first in church we two were ask'd,
Ah would we had not gone at last!
My husband…'
This use of a stanza form composed of a triplet followed by an apostrophe was also used by Jane's sister Ann in 'My Mother' (published 1804), a poem destined to become as popular worldwide as 'The Star'. But it was not from Ann that Jane borrowed the form: both sisters were indebted for that to William Cowper, a poet whose works were much admired in Non-conformist circles for their domestic pieties.
In 1803, 'To Mary', a poem by Cowper, had been published posthumously. It sadly regretted the terminal illness of a longtime companion:
'The twentieth year is well night past
Since first our sky was overcast,
Ah would that this might be the last!
My Mary…'
While it is easy to see why Jane could not have published a poem that explicitly followed the syntax of Cowper's so closely, it is puzzling why she would have chosen to speak at all in a loud spirited tone the very reverse of the quiet piety heard in Cowper's poem.
Quite possibly Girish Kulkarni, familiar with the peculiarities of the entire cosmos, would have hit upon the answer rather more quickly than I did. The truth is that the lens of the Telescope of Time through which we now look at Jane's poem has been adjusted, if not changed. It is not Jane but we who have upended and abandoned her customary moral assumptions.
In reading a dramatic monologue such as these three poems are, we tend to identify with the speaker – unless and until our own values cause us to take exception to what they are saying.
While we today may hear the voice of Jane's disillusioned bride as that of a spirited young woman putting her negligent husband right about the needs of his new partner, Jane would have heard it as that of a strident one who needs to learn, as does the young woman in 'Display', to make the transition from being a petulant bride to a sensible wife.
Of course it could still be that something of Jane's heart has gone into her portrait of the bride, even as her head has not. Could it be that her bride is simultaneously an admirable and independently-minded young woman and a pitiable and petulant one? Perhaps she owns a cat called Schrödinger?
Cosmos
Conceptions of the cosmos, so I understand from Girish Kulkarni's lecture, are likewise composed of fragments that might be perceived diametrically differently and re-arranged coherently in diverse ways.
That said, can there really be any comparison between earth-bound scribblers mired in the maya of drafting pretty little verses and cosmologists far out in space intent on measuring as they are wafted along on it what the ancient seers referred to as the Breath of Brahma?
Girish Kulkarni's recent public lecture on Cosmology at Kaapi for Kuriosity may be found here. John Drew's latest collection of essays and verses, Bangla File, is available from ULAB Press, Dhaka.