Choose Something Like a Star

How one person felt . . . . . from the Accidental Christian (a blog).

. . . . And inside the music folder I was holding was Frostiana - Randall Thompson's choral song-cycle of Frost poems. I love each of the pieces, and sang them when I was in high school. But of all them, I have a special fondness for Choose Something Like a Star.

The choral director played a recording of Choose Something Like a Star so that the (philistine) parents could get a taste of this beautiful work of art. Being the weepy-gal that I've been lo these many weeks/months, I teared up as I listened. The poem itself is true dignity; married to Thompson's music, it is dignity incarnate . . . .

I see how I have taken blame too far. Now is the time to stand apart from the mob; to be centered and confident; to be content with who I am, even as I strive to be a more excellent and more authentic "me" each day; now is the time for a certain height.

Yes, we may choose something like a star to stay our minds on and be staid.

~

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud-
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to the wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, 'I burn.'
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use Language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.