This is a neat little poem, and the astronomical facts are certainly accurate, but I find it hard to pin down Elizabeth Jennings’s exact thought processes here. Is she thinking of poetic fame, which may take years to arrive, and when it does may indeed find us somewhere else, like, well, dead? The poems of Edward Thomas, for example were barely noticed in his lifetime, and it was not until many years after his death that he became the beloved figure he is now.

Or is there a more specific personal narrative at work here? For example, did the poet once love another who did not reciprocate her feelings until it was too late, when she had moved on and become a different person?

In any event, even if we ourselves may have no such prospect or no such narrative, the poem may still give us incidental cause to reflect on the chance nature of love: on how we come down through life bouncing like a pinball from one accidental circumstance to another. I imagine most of us can frame a thousand scenarios in which we never met our partner: never worked for the same organisation, or attended the same school, or got on the same bus, or went to the same party, all leading to a life unknowably different, in which there perhaps never was another for our eyes, as the poem puts it, to claim as beautiful.

Delay

The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star’s impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

Elizabeth Jennings