Abstract
This chapter explores my own favorite poem, the twenty-line soliloquy of Guilia in the unfinished drama Floris in Italy. Guilia compares her life to the passage of a comet that brightens the night. As a young girl she and the comet are both “scarce worth discovery” but they grow and brighten until she “hangs upon the flame-cased Sun” and finally “her tether calls her” to old age and “not ungentle death.” This poem is simply magnificent. It almost certainly reflects the path and behavior of a real comet, Tempel-Respighi, that appeared during the summer of 1864.
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Levy, D.H. (2016). Scarce Worth Discovery. In: The Starlight Night. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 419. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19878-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19878-1_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19877-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19878-1
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