“The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and left her in the centre of a black-blue vault. She sailed along, followed by multitudes of stars, small, and bright, and sharp.”

— Dorothy Wordsworth

January 25, 1798 <br class="br">Compare Wordsworth's "A Night-Piece", lines 1-16 http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww123.html. <br class="br">Diaries

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Dorothy Wordsworth6

English author, poet and diarist 1771–1855

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“Heaven's ebon vault,
Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love has spread
To curtain her sleeping world.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto IV
Queen Mab (1813)

“The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Two (pp. 50-51).

“Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

“If I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.

Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder.. But mostly it didn't, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.

The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn't fall. She spent the rest of her time holding onto whatever scraps she had left.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

“All the light of the day, fleeing the earth, seemed for one brief moment to take refuge in the sky; pink clouds spiralled round the full moon that was as green as pistachio sorbet and as clear as glass; it was reflected in the lake.”

Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942) French novelist who died at the age of 39 in Auschwitz

Source: Suite Française

“THE Moon is sailing o'er the sky,
But lonely all, as if she pined
For somewhat of companionship,
And felt it was in vain she shined:
Earth is her mirror, and the stars
Are as the court around her throne;
She is a beauty and a queen;
But what is this? she is alone.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Moon from The London Literary Gazette (25th March 1826)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

“Her robe is a cloud, her face a flower;
Her balcony, glimmering with the bright spring dew,
Is either the tip of earth's Jade Mountain,
Or a moon-edged roof of paradise.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

"A Song Of Pure Happiness I" (清平调之一)

“And now her eyes grew bright, and brighter still,
Too bright for ours to look upon, suffused
With many tears, and closed without a cloud.
They set as sets the morning star, which goes
Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides
Obscured among the tempests of the sky,
But melts away into the light of heaven.”

Robert Pollok book The Course of Time

Book v, line 722.
The Course of Time (published 1827)

“And when she was finished they laid her in earth
Flowers growing, butterflies juggling over her…
She, so light, barely pressed the earth down
How much pain it took to make her as light as that!”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"To my mother" [Meiner Mutter] (May 1920), trans. John Willett in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 49
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)

“The broad cloud-driving moon in the clear sky
Lifts o’er the firs her shining shield,
And in her tranquil light
Sleep falls on forest and field.
See! sleep hath fallen: the trees are asleep:
The night is come. The land is wrapt in sleep.”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

The Storm is Over, The Land Hushes to Rest, l. 38-43.
Poetry

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