'"
"He is free now," said Kepler, "had he lived
He would have sent for Jeppe to join him there
At Prague. But death forestalled him, and your King.
The years in which he watched that planet Mars,
His patient notes and records, all were mine;
And, mark you, had he clipped or trimmed one fact
By even a hair's-breadth, so that his results
Made a pure circle of that planet's path
It might have baffled us for an age and drowned
All our new light in darkness. But he held
To what he saw. He might so easily,
So comfortably have said, 'My instruments
Are crude and fallible. In so fine a point
Eyes may have erred, too. Why not acquiesce?
Why mar the tune, why dislocate a world,
For one slight clash of seeming fact with faith?'
But no, though stars might swerve, he held his course,
Recording only what his eyes could see
Until death closed them.
Then, to his results,
I added mine and saw, in one wild gleam,
Strange as the light of day to one born blind,
A subtler concord ruling them and heard
Profounder tones of harmony resolve
Those broken melodies into song again.
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