Evening Storm, July 7, 2015

I. Color

Just before sunset Humpy Mountain turned dark green with a horizontal strip of deep, shining gold at the top: Gerard Manley Hopkins's "shining like shook foil." Puffy, pink-gold clouds rose above the mountain, darker clouds south of them. Lightning flashed occasionally. The ground took on a deep pink Alpine glow (Heidi in the Alps: "Toute en rose!"). In the south a rainbow emerged from the rose-tingled background, subtle and faint, almost transparent, letting the rose-pink sky show through the rainbow colors. I stood on my deck to watch the show, enraptured by color.

II. Resplendence

How modern my description is with all its color. An Old English poet, enamored like all Anglo-Saxons by shining gold objects and burnished weapons, would have emphasized the pulsating glow, the radiance of the clouds in the dying sunlight. Hue, the backbone of my description, would have been secondary to surface in his: the gleaming lights against the lowering shadows of the clouds. To the Anglo-Saxon poet, the rainbow would have been like the sky behind it because it was similarly luminous, not because it was similarly colored. With his Old English vocabulary so rich in words for surfaces, he would have emphasized the glossy light of the clouds in contrast to the darkness, and because brilliant scintillations convey a sense of ecstasy, he would have used them as a metaphoric platform for praising God. If I were to be both myself and the Anglo-Saxon poet, I would convey an impression of both the color and the glow of that magnificent sky, omitting God and praising the glorious light itself.

III. Music

As I watched the changing colors and brightnesses of the sky, I could hear in the forest below me a strange animal call, like an intake of breath with a rising tone at the end. Insect? Bird? Tree mammal? For weeks I have peered penetratingly into the woods to detect its source and seen nothing. I have gotten up in the middle of the night and walked outside to shine a flashlight into the tree the sound was coming from and seen nothing. But tonight in the rosy sunset I saw a bird fly to a tree and make that sound. My binoculars showed the large eyes and corkscrew neck of an owl, smaller than a barred owl, maybe a saw-whet. I could hear him singing, with that strange sucking-in whistle, to another owl, who answered with a daintier voice. They kept singing to each other even after dark, even in the dribbling rain that finally accompanied the bright lightning flashes and the glowing rose-pink sky. Then the owls were quiet, or gone, and a more insistent, rejuvenating rain and a wind in the trees made their own music of whooshes and patterings with an occasional accent from the wind chimes.