We sing that endearing rhyme to our cute little babies even before they can barely lisp the shortest of words…
We always however end up teaching our children to learn only the first 4 lines of this rhyme …. little knowing that the rest of the poem is much more meaningful to ourselves …
The line “traveler in the dark thanks you for your little spark, he could not tell which way to go ” … is a real beauty …
Julius Caesar told Brutus … Shakespeare’s play :
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, for we are underlings.”
The nursery rhyme thus echoes the same truth the Bard of Avon spoke about: the utter insignificance of “underlings” under the vast cosmic skies where countless stars twinkle , and reminding us not to go “faulting” them “but ourselves” for our sad destinies … we will bring it upon ourselves, our fall from pride, if we let human conceit make us think of ourselves as being somehow “up above the world so high”… like some imperial and imperious Emperor Caesar who thought of himself to have “vini, vidi… vici” — “I came, I saw…. I conquered”!
The nursery rhyme thus seeks to instil in the child’s mind the subliminal value of cultivating the virtue of humility…. I.e. the realisation of one’s own puny, insignificant status in this larger cosmic scheme and design …
However, if we remain humble in life then the stars turn friendly … for then they offer valuable directions in life to we “travellers” who cannot sometimes “tell which way to go…” since life as “dark blue sky” is often indeed both daunting and perplexing.
When everything else we try fails us to show the way forward in life … we turn to the stars to foretell our destiny , don’t we ? Soothsayers, oracles, astrologers, clairvoyants, fortune-tellers …. all have been with us in this world for countless ages, haven’t they? If we go to them they help us , guide us in navigating through the darkness in our life … And where do they all seek their inspiration and power of prophecy from ? From the stars of course ! They somehow, we believe, possess the magic that enables them to “peep through the curtains” of the sky and tell us “which way to go”.
The infinite number of stars in the firmament thus do look upon us all kindly like constant friends who are always there for us in our moments of darkness no matter what, and ever ready and willing to show the light upon the foggy paths of life we choose to take and tread … The stars —- the diamonds in the sky— are our constant steadfast friends for, as the rhyme ends, the “stars never shut their eyes till the sun is in the sky…”
Sudarshan Madabushi