(Illustration: The Hermit card from The Ancestral Path Tarot . Artist: Julie Cuccia-Watts)
O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.
"Keats' Eremite"... ?
Eremite is another word for hermit. This is, I understand, a reference to an excerpt from a poem (Bright Star) by John Keats. Keats wanted to take a blissful moment with his lover and store it way like a hermit hides from civilization, to make it last forever. So when Robert Frost says "and steadfast as Keats' Eremite/ not even stooping from its sphere", in the poem Choose Something Like a Star, he's describing the star's constant place in the sky for us to focus on in difficult times. (HERE)
The poem by Keats:
Bright Star
By John Keats
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
Astrologically Hermit links to Saturn, Aquarius and Virgo & the Earth element. Numerically Hermit connects to its card number: 9 (produced by 3 engaging with itself: 3 x 3).
Generally interpreted as a withdrawal into solitude, or retreat from the everyday world, seeking wisdom, self-reflection, introspection, hopefully finding guidance. Negatively, a running away from people or things, leading to loneliness.
In art, a hermit:
 |
| St Anthony the Hermit by Albrecht Durer |
More about St Anthony - several of them in fact, HERE.
I rather like Anthony the Great, but I guess the image above is, as titled,
Anthony the Hermit (c.468–c.520).
I suspect legends of all Saints, St. Anthony included, become entangled over time.
Temptation of St Anthony (or one of 'em) was a popular subject for painters of centuries long gone. Here's an example, this by Bernardino Parenzano (c.1494). Click on image for bigger version.
 |
| The Temptations of St Anthony |
Finally: last lines of a poem, Hermits, by James Galvin. The full poem is at
Poetry Foundation, here.
When hermits die
They close their eyes. They never hear
The parson sermonize how somewhere
There is hope where no hope was.
Tanglefoot,
Dead-On-Your-Feet,
A chance to be alone for a chance to be abandoned,
Everything is lost or given.
Hermits never know they’re dead till the roof falls in.
