Index for Tome of Stars Brief Analyses
Tome of Stars consists of the central work of that name (Items 1-6) and four “companion” collections (one of them, Better Voices, a collection of famous English romanic poetry set to song). The “analysis pages” house short analytical vignettes that seek to encapsulate how the poet sees the work. This page is the root index for the hundreds of poems to come. A series of buttons above allows one to quickly jump to specific collections. Right underneath are a short “Foreword” to convey the author’s complicated relationship with providing an analysis of his own work and a “Background” section to help fill in some of the universe of symbolic elements important to the poet.
Foreword
Go not to the Elves for counsel,
for they will answer both no and yes.
—Frodo Baggins, The Fellowship of the Ring
Before we begin, a warning: poets prove poor pedagogues. Mystery is our muse and ambiguity our opioid. Many of us suffer from severe allergies to certainty and dogma, lust for alliteration and assonance, and seek the drug-like high of metaphor to the detriment of both our verse and daily lives. I won’t even start with all that rhyming nonsense some of us meter out.
This is the “Analyses” portion of the website, but if you’ve come here hoping for the definitive dissection of Tome of Stars in the real and far less glimmering world of flesh and bone, this companion breakdown may become a source of disappointment.
“What the author meant” is often nothing more than a cheap and lazy form of reader heart-and-mind control. To be painfully frank, even I don’t know exactly what I mean at times. Rereading my own poems, it can feel like I am entering a familiar dream that I repeatedly misremember and whose disintegrating echo I passionately massacre in crude translation to language. I often ask myself: what in the world was I trying to say here? Why, this isn’t how I feel or what I think at all! And, a recurring favorite, why am I crying every time I read these lines?
Dear Reader, as a sibling non-volunteer member of this species, doomed to inherit an amalgamation of flaws, dreams, confusions, prejudices, yearnings, and lunacy, you should not find this in the least surprising. Poetry is condensed, metaphorical, and written in the language of symbolism from the faded shroom-like visions of baffled sentimentalists. It impartially births both monsters and masterpieces. Some poems are both.
Many of the poems in Tome of Stars were distilled from long, meandering letters or years of emotional experience, pages upon pages of prose, conversations, unsent messages, or silent reckonings of the soul. How can one distill that into 14 lines of rhyming iambic pentameter?
It’s impossible. Beware then the mysterious alchemy that is employed. Poets seize an ocean of obvious events, simple words, and meanings the size of mountains and then dare to transmogrify them into the mental space of a thimble. Much (most?) is lost and yet much is gained in this mad transmutation. And, on rare occasions, what survives in that thimble can be more potent than anything one could have written in a thousand pages.
That’s why everyone should believe in miracles. But the literary analyst should be wary lest they very much lose their way in a labyrinth of assumptions, pride, and low imagination (the poet’s or their own).
Art has meaning for people quite outside the artist’s intent - often contrary to their intent. Given the diverse experiences and personalities across humanity, the irrational and unknowable machinations of our minds (even, or especially, to ourselves), as well as the shudderingly clumsy and imperfect media available to convey those imaginings to another awareness, I do not believe it should be any other way.
Nonetheless, many often find it valuable (or at least entertaining) to know more about what the artist might imagine their intent to be, the meaning of the language used, the symbolisms baked into their psyche, the allusions and delusions incorporated into the text. In this companion section, I hope to walk through the poems in Tome of Stars and provide such a perspective.
However, in offering analysis here, I don’t claim authority, even as the author. Perhaps most especially not as the author. I certainly don’t want to wield “what the author meant” like a cudgel to control your reading. That phrase, in the wrong hands, becomes a weapon that shuts down a reader’s wonder and imagination, their critical integration and application of the art to help fashion meaning in this crazed universe. Art and life are far too important to give that much of a damn about the author.
Take these analyses instead as a meandering tour of “might-have-beens,” a friendly companion to your own interpretations, not a replacement. If a poem strikes you differently than the analysis herein, I hope you’ll trust your own resonance.
One poem in the collection was initially titled “Ciggendra Gehwelc Wile Pœt Hine Man Gehere”, which is Old English for “He who cries out wants to be heard.” I chose this not out of a love for (or even knowledge of) Old English itself, but because important elements of symbolism in Tome of Stars have ties to a significant figure from my youth: J.R.R. Tolkien. One of Tolkien’s main biographers and defenders, philologist Tom Shippey, writes in his book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century:
“Some have felt (and said) that he should have written his results up in academic treatises instead of fantasy fiction. He might then have been taken more seriously by a limited academic audience. On the other hand, all through his lifetime that academic audience was shrinking, and has now all but vanished. There is an Old English proverb that says (in Old English, and with the usual provocative Old English obscurity), Ciggendra gehwelc wile pœt hine man gehere, ‘Everyone who cries out wants to be heard!’ Tolkien wanted to be heard, and he was. But what was it that he had to say?”
Similarly, some deep part of me clearly wants to be heard as well. Generally, and, despite her devastating antipathy toward me, by the Stargirl herself.
And I must also acknowledge that this journey is not without its burdens. I do not simply mean the investment of time, energy, and resources in an endeavor like this, nor the efforts to maintain secrecy and anonymity (the latter perhaps doomed, for which I apologize in advance to those involved in taking this risk).
More pressing is the emotional and spiritual weight of constantly keeping this heartbreak before my awareness. When thinking or writing about this collection, it was not uncommon for my mind to slip to Tomb of Stars, a perspective on the existential anguish within it, seen not diffracted through the prism of a star-crossed romance, but through a glass, darkly (and yet with truth). It would seem far simpler to let it go entirely, to dismiss my beloved, our shared creation, our history, a near endless sea of suffering, and my own heart. Hurl this Ring of Power into the fires Orodruin. Yet, despite my many attempts to do so over the years, the failure in such efforts has been nothing short of spectacular (perhaps I simply have lacked for my own Gollum). As the poem Apologia argues:
“Move on,” they grunt, as shedding some worn cloak.
Are hearts thus merely dressed and simply shorn?
“Let go,” the mantra modern masses croak.
My hands are empty; chains my soul adorn.
True adore’s steel, it pierces blood and bone,
Forever shackling in shrines of stone.
Still, I am neither obligated to remain emotionally and intellectually engaged, nor to pour my energy into producing and maintaining Tome of Stars or its analysis. Unlike her place within my soul, such efforts remain a choice. And though I strive now to make that choice, it will be an arduous quest, one that I cannot predict, and one in which I may certainly fail, either in this life, or due to my life’s ending (I am no longer remotely a young man and have already struggled with serious disease). As with all things, time will tell.
So, on those notes of cheer and good will, let us gently begin. Take this book as you would a conversation over wine or weed with a slightly deranged friend: prone to digressions, often incorrect, occasionally profound, and, above all, heartbreakingly, embarrassingly earnest (and as the years stagger by, increasingly tired).
Advice is a dangerous gift,
even from the wise to the wise,
and all courses may run ill.
—Gildor Inglorion, The Fellowship of the Ring
Background Elements
Such an array of influences that I feel like it is best approached with an annotated guide.
—JTC, aka “Chemical Waste,” Signal chat, March 28, 2025
Be careful what you wish for, my old friend.
But indeed, this poet’s awareness is overburdened, and many oddities creep into the work without introduction or explanation. Most can be ignored. Two require, I believe, some introduction: these are (1) the formative influence of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium and the rampant symbolism from it imbuing the author’s writings, and (2) the impact of classical Indian dance (Bharatanatyam) on the collection from structure to metaphor (and real life elements in some verse). Rather than extend this background to exhaustion, I added far below four odd avatar videos I made about these topics as well as giving general introductions to the project (odd, but serious—I used these tools to preserve anonymity and protect the privacy of others as much as I could).
Perhaps the most central element of backstory involves Tolkien’s character of Varda. So I’ll indulge a little bit here and talk about her.
Tolkien’s cosmogony centers on a monotheistic deity called Ilúvatar (the “All-Father”). While part of the created cosmos, Ilúvatar transcends it, and all that exists has root cause in him. This is a theological framework consistent with Tolkien’s strong Catholicism, and his faith informed the stories and myths he developed. Ilúvatar births other spiritual beings, the Ainur, angelic intelligences, through his thought alone:
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. —J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Among the Ainur, Varda is counted as one of the greatest. She participated in the Ainulindalë, or the Music of the Ainur, a cosmopoietic collaboration of the angelic beings metaphorically described as a great symphony. Ilúvatar gifts them a great theme that they take up and add to from their own creative energies. This collaborative composition forms the foundation of the universe’s structure and destiny:
With Manwë dwells Varda, Lady of the Stars, who knows all the regions of Eä. Too great is her beauty to be declared in the words of Men or of Elves; for the light of Ilúvatar lives still in her face. In light is her power and her joy. Out of the deeps of Eä she came to the aid of Manwë; for Melkor she knew from before the making of the Music and rejected him, and he hated her, and feared her more than all others whom Eru made. —J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
In this passage is mentioned Melkor, the Satanic fallen-angel of the mythology, the greatest in power and knowledge of the Ainur who fell from grace before the making of the world and sought to control and pervert the Music. He is later called by the Elves "Morgoth”, the Dark Enemy. In contrast to the darkness of Morgoth is the light of Varda, the angelic spirit he feared the most, for light was her essence and power, and she fashioned the stars to gift illumination to the Children of Ilúvatar:
Then Varda went forth from the council, and she looked out from the height of Taniquetil, and beheld the darkness of Middle-earth beneath the innumerable stars, faint and far. Then she began a great labour, greatest of all the works of the Valar since their coming into Arda. She took the silver dews from the vats of Telperion, and therewith she made new stars and brighter against the coming of the Firstborn; wherefore she whose name out of the deeps of time and the labours of Eä was Tintallë, the Kindler, was called after by the Elves Elentári, Queen of the Stars. It is told that even as Varda ended her labours, and they were long, when first Menelmacar strode up the sky and the blue fire of Helluin flickered in the mists above the borders of the world, in that hour the Children of the Earth awoke, the Firstborn of Ilúvatar. By the starlit mere of Cuiviénen, Water of Awakening, they rose from the sleep of Ilúvatar; and while they dwelt yet silent by Cuiviénen their eyes beheld first of all things the stars of heaven. Therefore they have ever loved the starlight, and have revered Varda Elentári above all the Valar. —J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Thus, more than almost any other figure in Tolkien’s legendarium, Varda Elentári is the uncorrupted light that opposes darkness.
In my own life, Varda went far beyond a simple fictional character in the eccentric mythology of an English linguist. She entered early, when I was still a teen in a house where no god was ever named, except in anger (my parents had both suffered under abusive figures in organized religion). There was no religion in my upbringing, only the erratic, often cataclysmic rhythms of a deeply dysfunctional home, marked by abuse, silence, and the strange hyper-vigilance that children develop when chaos becomes their air. I came to Tolkien young, too young to fully understand the world he built, but not too young to recognize that something in it shimmered with a beautiful transcendence that I needed, desperately. And in those pages, amid the grandeur of Valinor and the sorrow of exiled Elves, I found Varda Elentári, Star-Queen, the Lady of Light that stood undimmed before the darkness.
At the same time I was also falling in love with the stars themselves. Not mythology, not metaphor, but the physical sky of our observable universe. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos awakened my mind and my sense of wonder, and provided a path to stoke that fire through knowledge and scientific inquiry. His reverence for the vastness of space, for the immensity of time, for the fragile miracle of consciousness in the void, resonated with something deep within me. In that terribly vast beauty, human brokenness lost potency. I could transcend through awe and thought the ugliness around me (and within). Whereas others are unnerved to feel the grandeur of the universe that erases their significance, for me, it was liberating. Salvific.
In the Varda of Tolkien’s legendarium, creator of the stars, the one whom Melkor feared and whom the Elves venerated, I found a mythic embodiment of that cosmic awe. Not as a deity to believe in, but as an imaginative symbol that became psychically incarnate: the one who placed light in the darkness to guide God’s Children. Her presence lingered in me like starlight, unseen, but felt. There is a kind of inner mythology that develops in children who are left too long alone with pain and wonder. Varda became a personal divine abstraction, the goddess of everything that remained pure, even when I’d never myself had the experience of the sacred (except in my own head through imagination). She married my love of Tolkien’s myths with my love of the greater creation beyond Earth.
Years later, long after life had buried my youthful dreams in layers of toil, responsibility, and depression, a women flashed into my life like a star being born. I fell in love with her with mythic force. Indeed, as should be obvious if you have persevered to this point, Tome of Stars was born from my failure to love her as she should have been loved.
Her name was fatefully that of a constellation. That fact might seem charming and trivial, a poetic coincidence. Not for me. Names matter to the creatures on Earth that name things, and stories wrap themselves around names, and my need and imagination were too pathological. In ways neither she nor I fully understood, she entered my private cosmology. She became my Varda. She was my Stargirl, the secret archetype long gestating in a boy who stared too hard at the stars for personal deliverance.
And so, when I say that Varda is more than a literary figure, I mean that in the strange interior map of my psyche, she became a fixed point, one whose light refracted through a trinity of science, fantasy, and love.
Understanding this contextualizes many symbols and references in Tome of Stars, even if it might not present a coherent construct of a poet’s ravaged psyche.