“One year since a 3 p.m. midnight;
An opportune pause in the sunlight;
A brief interaction
With solar subtraction;
Eclipsing occasion in hindsight.”
The 8 April 2025 limerick noted the one-year anniversary of the total solar eclipse in April 2024, for which much of Ohio was in the path of totality.
“One year since a 3 p.m. midnight; /
An opportune pause in the sunlight…”
I’ve already written at length about the 8 April 2024 eclipse in a few places, but it was a truly memorable day. As anniversaries often do, 8 April 2025 arrived remarkably quickly.
“A brief interaction /
With solar subtraction; /
Eclipsing occasion in hindsight.”
April 2024 was a good chance to celebrate eclipses in both poetry and science; April 2025 provided a chance to reflect on the occasion.
***
The poem translation here is straightforward. However, I had further written back in 2024 about how the occasion of the eclipse itself reminded me indirectly of the structure of the interlocking rubaiyat, and that essay might benefit from revisiting as well.
Part of the publicity leading up to a major astronomical event involves the long-term data on which types of eclipses will follow and where, long into the future; I thus commented that “a day like Monday invites us to think deliberately across decades.” That sense of sending a signal flare into the future had reminded me of the rubaiyat, where the rhyme scheme of the first stanza (AABA) inspires the rhyme scheme of the second (BBCB), and so on.
I often think of this intriguing poetic form when I am teaching the history of the periodic table, as the periodicity of the elements means that there are patterns of repeated elemental behaviors with every new row. It likewise comes to mind in my writing routine here– the limericks written in one April’s NaPoWriMo inspire the topics for the next academic year’s set of essays.
The rubaiyat’s self-perpetuating structure invites the question: how does the poet know when and where to stop? Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is a beautiful example of the form. In the part of the poem I know best, he famously resolves the rubaiyat with four closing lines that all rhyme: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep.” Bringing the rhyme scheme full circle in the same stanza seems a fitting close. (Interestingly, while few details overlap between a snowy evening and a spring day, I had not remembered before looking back at the link that Frost’s poem is specifically set on “[t]he darkest evening of the year.” That yielded a further-intriguing connection to the darkest moment that an April afternoon would ever see!)
Likewise, if this is the last time I’ll formally write about the 2024 eclipse in this space, it seems appropriate that my writing has gone in a few circles in celebrating the occasion, between the April 2024 and 2025 poems and the October 2024 and 2025 posts.
Chemphasis 