Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Oceanica: Vol. XXXI. 1876–79.

Miscellaneous: Polar Regions

Hymn to the North Star

By William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)

THE SAD and solemn night

Has yet her multitude of cheerful fires;

The glorious host of light

Walk the dark hemisphere till she retires;

All through her silent watchings, gliding slow,

Her constellations come, and climb the heavens, and go.

Day, too, hath many a star

To grace his gorgeous reign, as bright as they:

Through the blue fields afar,

Unseen, they follow in his flaming way:

Many a bright lingerer, as the eve grows dim,

Tells what a radiant troop arose and set with him.

And thou dost see them rise,

Star of the Pole! and thou dost see them set.

Alone, in thy cold skies,

Thou keep’st thy old unmoving station yet,

Nor join’st the dances of that glittering train,

Nor dipp’st thy virgin orb in the blue western main.

There, at morn’s rosy birth,

Thou lookest meekly through the kindling air;

And eve, that round the earth

Chases the day, beholds thee watching there;

There noontide finds thee, and the hour that calls

The shapes of polar flame to scale heaven’s azure walls.

Alike, beneath thine eye,

The deeds of darkness and of light are done;

High towards the star-lit sky

Towns blaze,—the smoke of battle blots the sun,—

The night-storm on a thousand hills is loud,—

And the strong wind of day doth mingle sea and cloud.

On thy unaltering blaze

The half-wrecked mariner, his compass lost,

Fixes his steady gaze,

And steers, undoubting, to the friendly coast;

And they who stray in perilous wastes, by night,

Are glad when thou dost shine, to guide their footsteps right.

And, therefore, bards of old,

Sages, and hermits of the solemn wood,

Did in thy beams behold

A beauteous type of that unchanging Good,

That bright eternal Beacon, by whose ray

The voyager of time should shape his heedful way.