Cut out into little stars
I was no more than 25 the first time I read these lines in an essay written by a father mourning the loss of his child after a long and heartbreaking illness. They certainly made an impression.
Somehow I failed to notice where they came from, missed that they were spoken by a love-struck young girl or that this poetry came from one of most famous plays of all time.
I have thought of these words many times over the decades since and they came back to me as I took in the news of the recent death of a good man: the sudden silence, the clarity of the unreachable stars in the cold sky, the unbridgeable gap.
I find these lines from the most romantic of plays very comforting in their simplicity.
“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act lll, Scene 2
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