by David H. Levy

Morello’s outline there is wrongly traced,

His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,

Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?

Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for?

Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto, 1855.

Decades ago during the fall of a year that I recall might have been 1972, I attended Yom Kippur services at our family synagogue in Montreal, Congregation Shaar Hashomayim. The Congregation had instituted a new feature that year, a Yom Kippur Teach-in. I decided to give it a try. The topics were completely open that year, and the audience applauded every comment. I was a trifle nervous about saying anything, but I stood up and made a comment about God, and how our concepts of God are as different as each of us might be. I ended my comment with these two lines from Robert Browning’s famous Andrea del Sarto:

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for?

My comment did get a smattering of applause. Afterward my life went on, and on, until few days ago, when writing a book featuring poetry about the night sky, I chanced upon Browning’s poem again.

This Browning poem is surely one of his most famous and insightful. The poet suggests that Mount Morello, in Italy near Florence, is “wrongly traced.” Hed then supposes that the mountain itself, if it has consciousness, wouldn’t care if its outline was correct or not: “what does the mountain care?” In the final two lines of this section the poet transcends geographically from Morello to infinity, from earthly cares to the outermost reaches of space and time”– “Or what’s a heaven for?”

It is not often that someone can compare the reading of a great and fabulous poem with a sporting event, but here I try :

I like to compare these lines of “Andrea del Sarto” with watching a baseball game. In my experience a typical baseball game consists of lengthy stretches of strike-outs, some walks, breaks between innings, and other trivia. But these breaks are interspersed with exciting base hits, doubles, triples, and home runs. These events often happen without warning, and a large crowd in the stands can be electrified instantaneously, rising to its feet as the ball heads off the field, into the stands. It does seem odd to compare a work of English Literature to a baseball game, but in this case, it works.

Writing about ball games, I have missed a football game to see a deep partial eclipse of the Moon On August 26, 1961, there was an eclipse in which 99.2 percent of the Moon was embedded in the Earth’s umbral shadow. In this way the stadium offers us yet another way to enjoy the night sky, and to remember that even during sporting events, we can enjoy the night sky by looking at it briefly from our stadium chairs. When we do that during the most important game of all, we are truly winners.