Promethean
Fire Text by Alfred Noyes
I sing of those who caught the pure Promethean fire
One from another, each crying as he went down
To one that waited, crowned with youth and joy.
Take thou the splendour, carry it out of sight
Into the great new age I must not know
Into the great new realm I must not tread.
Promethean
Fire - Program Notes
The piece was composed
for the July 7, 2019, Mount Wilson Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the
Dome series, curated by cellist and artistic director Cécilia Tsan.
Mount Wilson Observatory founder George Ellery
Hale invited his friend, the English poet Alfred Noyes, on a night
when no members of the press were invited, to commemorate the night of first
light at the 100-inch telescope dome in 1917. The text of Promethean
Fire comes from this poem. Hale’s colleague,
my grandfather, Harold D. Babcock, used the text in his
obituary of Hale in 1938, wherein he also describes an evening
open house held at the observatory in 1919, with music supplied by a
strolling harpist.
Promethean
Fire is essentially a short tribute to Hale. He had previously built Yerkes Observatory in
Wisconsin, but Mount Wilson was Hale's first mountain-top observatory, which
involved multiple logistical difficulties. It eventually included three solar
telescopes and two large reflector telescopes for night-time work. Andrew
Carnegie and others helped make the success of Hale's observatory possible, Edwin
Hubble and others helped make it internationally known, and scientists such as
Albert Einstein came to visit. But Hale had the original vision for the
mountain.
Discoveries
made at Mount Wilson include the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and our position
in it, proof that we are not the only galaxy in the universe, and proof that
the universe itself is expanding.
Hale did
not live to see the completion of his dream for Mount Palomar, the 200-inch
telescope, in 1948. He could only imagine the images that this elegant machine
would collect. Nor could he have foreseen the progress brought by the Hubble
Space Telescope, nor can any of us know what the still-under-construction Giant
Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Las Campanas, Chile will reveal about our universe.
But each successive generation of observers has built on the foundation of the
last and carried on the Promethean Fire.
A REMARKABLE LIFE
Following Hale’s death, colleague
Harold Babcock ended his words of memoriam with these words:
“Few men have enjoyed a life so rich as Hale’s in those returns that
bring the deepest satisfaction. …His life was a rebuke and a refutation to
cynicism. In the midst of our irreparable loss, the words of his friend, poet
Alfred Noyes, stand out in clear relief:
“….I sing
Of those who caught the pure Promethean fire
One from another, each crying as he went down
To one that waited, crowned with youth and joy,
— Take thou the splendour, carry it out of sight
Into the great new age I must not know
Into the great new realm I must not tread.”
Of those who caught the pure Promethean fire
One from another, each crying as he went down
To one that waited, crowned with youth and joy,
— Take thou the splendour, carry it out of sight
Into the great new age I must not know
Into the great new realm I must not tread.”
For more on George Ellery Hale,
see this excellent documentary by my
friends Todd and Robin Mason:
