Lollingdon Downs by John Masefield

Ever since I was old enough to go out and look at the night sky, I have gone out and looked at the night sky.  I do it almost every night, noting how the constellations rise and fall with the seasons, how the planets wander in and out of the spangled starscape, how the moon waxes and wanes. Lo! there is Orion the hunter and his faithful dog in summer, and now Scorpio, his bane, in winter; and all the time the Southern Cross wheels about an unseen axis.

At the time of writing, Venus is riding high in the sky as the evening star.  I think of Tolkien and his invented mythology of Middle Earth.  There is Eärendil the mariner in his heavenly ship, and the silmaril bound to his brow and shining with the mingled lights of the two trees. 

And at such times, I think of what it might be like to roam the aether, sailing on invisible tides, the solar winds in my hair, feeling in the rawest form the cosmogonic forces that have shaped us all.

I am not alone.  Tolkien got there before me, as did John Masefield, and the Silver Surfer.  I provide here an excerpt from Masefield's extended poem Lollingdon Downs.  Sometimes, I too wish that my soul might sail for a million years in such a fashion: no death, no tears.

I could not sleep for thinking of the sky,
The unending sky, with all its million suns
Which turn their planets everlastingly
In nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs.

If I could sail that nothing, I should cross 
Silence and emptiness with dark stars passing, 
Then, in the darkness, see a point of gloss 
Burn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing, 

And rage into a sun with wandering planets 
And drop behind, and then, as I proceed, 
See his last light upon his last moon's granites 
Die to a dark that would be night indeed. 

Night where my soul might sail a million years 
In nothing, not even Death, not even tears.