Tobias column: Arrival of fireflies sparks dreams of summer lights

Last night, a tiny glow flitted about our lace hydrangeas. It was the first firefly of the year.

Summer is here, as Robert Frost wrote, in “Fireflies in the Garden,” in 1921:

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,

And here on earth come emulating flies,

That though they never equal stars in size,

(And they were never really stars at heart)

Achieve at times a very star-like start.

Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.

And Frost is right about the night: the fireflies are prophets of the summer stars. The night skies now wheel under the constellations of Leo, Virgo, and Cancer. The ancient Greeks were close observers of nature, both on the ground and in the skies, and they drew poetic connections between life on the ground and lights in the sky.

This is fundamental human nature — a deeply spiritual imagination that recognizes connections everywhere simply because the cosmos is a single, vast and majestic web. All things are connected in a single ecology: that is exactly what the term “creation” from Genesis means — so of course, our life on the ground is connected to the life of the sky.

After all, as Joni Mitchell sang in 1971 in “Woodstock”:

We are stardust

We are golden

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden.

We used to have a lot closer relationship with the stars. Time was, way back, when folks could look at the night sky and figure, at a glance, exactly what season it was. And some, even, found hope in the diamond-studded sable dome, an assurance that life and love endure and even flourish past the mortal coil.

Here is William Wordsworth “The Stars are Mansions Built by Nature’s Hand” in 1820:

The stars are mansions built by Nature’s hand,

And, haply, there the spirits of the blest

Dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal vest;

Huge Ocean shows, within his yellow strand,

A habitation marvelously planned,

For life to occupy in love and rest ….

There is something to be said for the old Ptolemaic cosmology. A Greek Alexandrian astronomer of the 2nd Century AD, Claudius Ptolemaeus, taught that planet Earth is set at the center of the universe, and lies in the middle of concentric spheres that contained — from nearest to the Earth to the furthest — the epicyclic motions of Mercury, Venus, the sun (in orbit!), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, then the fixed, unmoving stars.

Of course, the Ptolemaic system is not the case. We orbit the sun, as Copernicus and Galileo stated (to the latter’s great discomfiture), not the other way around. But still, the old-fashioned astronomy made more intuitive sense.

I’m no flat-earther moon-landing denier by a long shot. But I have to say that gazing at the moon and the planets chasing the sun through the arching path of the elliptic — every night through the successive houses of the zodiac — is sheer poetry, like a melody that reverberates across the ages.

Of course, the garden is strewn, during the day, with summer lights. Not only do the planets follow the sun in the ancient cosmology, but so did the beautiful heliotrope — which is the answer to a riddle written by St. Aldhelm of Wessex in the 7th century:

I am born in the fertile field, flourishing of my own free will;

The shining summits grow golden with yellow blossom.

When the sun is setting I close, and open again at sunrise:

From that the wise Greeks worked out my name.

“Heliotrope” is the name the “wise Greeks worked out.” But the Anglo-Saxon name is even more poetic, more intuitively fetching: it is sigelhweorfa, that is, “sun-turner.”

What glorious names for the heliotrope in our familiar garden: “Sun-turner” — a flower that turns toward the sun. And in that same language, the sun itself is haled more poetically:

… when the candle of the sky

beams brightly, the radiance of light,

above the thrashing ocean. The land is adorned,

the world made beautiful, when the jewel of glory,

most marvelous of stars, shines across the expanse of ocean

and upon the ground, throughout the whole world.

“Candle of the sky.” In Anglo-Saxon — sweglcondelle. Is the sun not this?

Yes, I know that the sun is a star whose light is an emanation of electromagnetic radiation that is produced by hydrogen and helium fusion. And yes, I know that the sun is about 4.6 billion years old. But we can think two things at once, can’t we? We can quote science and poetry at the same time.

The Google machine will tell you that fireflies produce a chemical reaction inside their bodies that allows them to light up, and that this light is produced by special organs in their abdomens, utilizing chemicals called luciferin and enzymes called luciferases, along with oxygen, and other chemicals.

But is that what you think, what you feel, when you see these torch-bearers flitting in your sight?

These things are good to know. But it is just as good to know — or perhaps imagine and dream — that fireflies bear with them the same message as do their forebears in the sky, both night and day.

You were made to dream of summer lights. After all, “we are golden.”