Tag: storm

On this date

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

GLEE! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.

Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls,—
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!

How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”

Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.

~Emily Dickinson

This poem reminds me of a song sung by William Pint and Felicia Dale, so I’m including the lyrics here in full, though there are rather a lot of them. They recount a true story–the loss of the British lifeboat The Mary Stanford on this date ninety-one years ago. It’s a tragic tale, made all the more tragic by the fact that the vessel which The Mary Stanford was sent out to rescue was already saved by the time the English lifeboat launched. It seems like the kind of story that would have struck a chord in Dickinson’s imagination.

When master John Stanford of London town died
They read out his will and his legacy spied
It said take this bequest for to build me a craft
So that with it my name shouldn’t die
And give it to the R.N.L.I.

So they fashioned a lifeboat of Liverpool class
38 feet from the stem to the aft
With a close reefed mainsail on a 20 foot mast
And to grant the last wish of his life
Named it Mary after his wife

She went into service in 1916
And 63 times from the boathouse she screamed
Cross the shale of Rye Bay
Through the teeth of the storm
And into the mouth of the waves
All sailors lives there to save

Johnny come home they all sing from the pier
On the 15th day of November each year
And one day the sea she will give up her dead
And home will come young Johnny Head
Home will come young Johnny Head

Young Johnny Head
Had just turned seventeen
And to serve on the lifeboat was
Young Johnny’s dream
His father was the coxswain
His brother in the crew
And to serve he was willing to die
On the Mary Stanford of Rye

On November 15th
With the storm at its height
The Alice of Riga was losing her fight
Seven miles from Dungeness
She was drifting and lost
And the crew prayed and cried
To the moon
That’s when they heard the maroon

It was four in the morning
When young Johnny Head
On hearing the signal
He leapt from his bed
With his father and brother
They ran like the wind
That whipped up the furious waves
But there were lives to be saved

To haul out the lifeboat
Took blood, sweat and tears
It took them two hours
Must have seemed like two years
Exhausted and spent, they set her afloat
And into the barbarous waves
Rowed Mary to Alice’s aid

It was 6:45 when the shoremen lost sight
of the Mary
As she pitched out into the night
And at 6:51 the coastguard he rang,
Saying “Stand down your lifeboatmen
brave
For the Alice is already saved.”

Nobody knows from that day to this,
Why the coastguard got word
At eleven past six
But the message he kept forty minutes
or more
While seventeen brave men of Rye
Rowed into the tempest to die

It was almost noon on the terrible morn
And the families and launch crew had
Waited since dawn
When suddenly somebody
Pointed and cried
And there in the surf and the spray
The Mary Stanford she lay

Her body was battered
Her keel was upright
No close-reefed mainsail
No crewman in sight
They hauled her ashore
And they knelt round and prayed
Then gazed out again at the main
And the tears they ran like the rain

Then one by one
The sea gave up her dead
First Willie Clark then young Jimmy Head
Then Albert and Rob, the two Cutting boys
And three from the Pope family
And nine more sons of the sea

But young Johnny Head
He never came home
He lies out somewhere in the ocean alone
His comrades lie buried
In the churchyard at Rye
And they keep him a space for his bed
One day they’ll find Johnny Head

So the next time you sail
Around Hastings and Rye
Look to the distance and keep out an eye
And if you see a young man from the R.N.L.I.
Standing guard over the foam
You’ll know that Johnny’s come home

~Allen Maslen, “The Mary Stanford of Rye”

The errand of the eye

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Whether my bark went down at sea,
Whether she met with gales,
Whether to isles enchanted
She bent her docile sails;

By what mystic mooring
She is held to-day,—
This is the errand of the eye
Out upon the bay.

~Emily Dickinson

This whole poem is a sentence–one act of wondering, of uncertainty. The “bark” could represent anything, really–the point of the poem is the questioning. The poem crystallizes a moment of uncertainty.

I love the line “the errand of the eye.” The notion of the eye on a mission, actively searching rather than passively receiving images, is an intriguing one.

May all your isles be enchanted.

Thunderstorm

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THE WIND begun to rock the grass
With threatening tunes and low,—
He flung a menace at the earth,
A menace at the sky.

The leaves unhooked themselves from trees 5
And started all abroad;
The dust did scoop itself like hands
And throw away the road.

The wagons quickened on the streets,
The thunder hurried slow; 10
The lightning showed a yellow beak,
And then a livid claw.

The birds put up the bars to nests,
The cattle fled to barns;
There came one drop of giant rain, 15
And then, as if the hands

That held the dams had parted hold,
The waters wrecked the sky,
But overlooked my father’s house,
Just quartering a tree.

~Emily Dickinson

Okay, so not so much a Halloween poem, but there is definitely an element of the spooky and supernatural. It’s difficult to think about thunderstorms today–the sky is October blue, the sun pouring down as if to make up for the fact that it will be departing earlier tonight.

It’s definitely an autumn poem, too, with the leaves blowing from the trees. Everything in the poem is personified, from the wind to the leaves to the birds. All of nature is alive, inhabited, acting and reacting.

The poem ends with the quartering of a tree by lightning, and this does feel like a very Halloween-y image–the old cleft tree, scarred by storm. Though Dickinson does not describe the aftermath, the reader can see the tree, and this is the image with which she leaves us.

Storm: a prompt

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IT sounded as if the streets were running,
And then the streets stood still.
Eclipse was all we could see at the window,
And awe was all we could feel.

By and by the boldest stole out of his covert, To see if time was there.
Nature was in her beryl apron,
Mixing fresher air.

~Emily Dickinson
Image via Pexels.com.

Today, a prompt, inspired by Dickinson’s mastery of language. In the vein of the poem above, write a description of a natural event without naming the event itself or using any of the words typically associated with it. Dickinson manages to convey the noise, chaos, and finally the dissipation of a storm without ever using language we associate with storms (dark, stormy, tempest, rain, thunder, etc.). See if you can do the same.

An awful tempest

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AN AWFUL tempest mashed the air,
The clouds were gaunt and few;
A black, as of a spectre’s cloak,
Hid heaven and earth from view.

The creatures chuckled on the roofs 5
And whistled in the air,
And shook their fists and gnashed their teeth,
And swung their frenzied hair.

The morning lit, the birds arose;
The monster’s faded eyes 10
Turned slowly to his native coast,
And peace was Paradise!

~Emily Dickinson

Your prompt: taking a cue from the Myth, describe a natural phenomenon in monstrous terms. Happy writing!

Storm

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

It struck me every day
The lightning was as new
As if the cloud that instant slit
And let the fire through.

It burned me in the night, 5
It blistered in my dream;
It sickened fresh upon my sight
With every morning’s beam.

I thought that storm was brief,—
The maddest, quickest by; 10
But Nature lost the date of this,
And left it in the sky.

~Emily Dickinson
Image via pexels.com
https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-photography-of-boat-on-water-during-sunset-1118874/

I like this poem, but I’m not sure what to say about it, as my brain is pretty fried from a week of faculty meetings and prepping to teach five different courses starting this week, so I’m just going to leave this here for your enjoyment. Whatever your storms are, I hope they pass and are not left in the sky indefinitely.

Clouds like listless elephants

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On this long storm the rainbow rose,
On this late morn the sun;
The clouds, like listless elephants,
Horizons straggled down.

The birds rose smiling in their nests, 5
The gales indeed were done;
Alas! how heedless were the eyes
On whom the summer shone!

The quiet nonchalance of death
No daybreak can bestir; 10
The slow archangel’s syllables
Must awaken her.

~Emily Dickinson

Surprise! It’s an Emily Dickinson poem about…death!

This poem follows the same sensibility of many of Dickinson’s poems on the subject. Either a man or a woman has died, while all around them, life goes on as usual. There is a sense of bereavement from those left behind, but in the grave, all is quiet, accepted.

What strikes me as particularly marvelous about this Dickinson poem about death is the simile of the elephants in the first stanza. Exactly halfway through the poem, there is a very clear shift from images of beauty in nature and a sense of relief at coming through the storm to a sense of loss–a shift from life to death.

The elephantine clouds in the first stanza, however, are the foreshadowing. While the rest of nature is bright and vibrant, the clouds are “listless” and straggle down the horizon. It sounds like these elephants are on their last legs. There’s a sense of heaviness, too, in the choice of elephants, which is wonderfully paradoxical–clouds are light, floating.

Dickinson goes on to mention birds, a gale, and an archangel–all light things, flying things. The elephants in the sky, listlessly straggling down the horizon, stand in stark contrast. It’s a wonderful simile, and an excellent example of Dickinson on her A-game–offering up a view of the world from a surprising and challenging perspective.

Thunder

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

The farthest thunder that I heard
Was nearer than the sky,
And rumbles still, though torrid noons
Have lain their missiles by.
The lightning that preceded it
Struck no one but myself,
But I would not exchange the bolt
For all the rest of life.
Indebtedness to oxygen
The chemist may repay,
But not the obligation
To electricity.
It founds the homes and decks the days,
And every clamor bright
Is but the gleam concomitant
Of that waylaying light.
The thought is quiet as a flake,—
A crash without a sound;
How life’s reverberation
Its explanation found!

~Emily Dickinson

This seemed an appropriate poem for today, the day of July’s full moon. The July full moon is sometimes called the Buck Moon, for the bucks who are rubbing off their spring velvet in preparation for autumn. It’s also known as the Thunder Moon, for the summer storms that are prevalent during the month.

We’ve had some spectacular thunderstorms this season–the kind that split the air so that for an instant, nothing breathes. The kind that shake houses and trees to their foundations. In the instant that thunder first cleaves the sky, nothing else is possible, nothing else exists. The sound of it is one thing, the feeling another. When it rips through the clouds overhead, your breastbone shudders in your chest. It is so loud it is almost inaudible–like a giant too large for our eyes to take in.

Summer Storm

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

There came a wind like a bugle;
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors As from an emerald ghost;
The doom’s electric moccason
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!

~Emily Dickinson

Storms here begin with a slight shift of the light, a fluttering at the margins of the day. First the wind rises, kindled before the approaching tempest. Pine boughs toss and nod to slim locusts and walnuts, polite at first, until their branches begin a frenzied tangle. The first few premature walnut leaves tear loose and fall like golden teardrops dashed away by an invisible hand. Distant harbingers of autumn, they are sobering in their brightness, shimmering reminders that all things come to an end.

But the storm is not truly imminent until the Alleghenies are lost behind a cloak of blue-grey, first blurring and then vanishing as if into legend. When the mountains disappear, and only then, is the onslaught inevitable. Then we batten down the hatches, dash for the laundry, and wait. Though, more often than not, there isn’t time to wait before the first few spattering drops, dashed sideways by the courier wind, cut sideways through the whirling air.

As I write, the rain has stopped blowing sideways and is falling almost straight down, thunder grumbling above and lightning just flashes barely illuminating the lowering clouds. Some time after the end of June, summer thunderstorms cease to have the look of downpours that bring rainbows and instead take on the tints of autumn, hints of long rainy days that fade seamlessly into lengthening nights. Every season comes hard on the heels of the one before and ties itself into knots with the next. Sometimes I think there are either no seasons, or three hundred sixty-five of them. Maybe even twenty-four seasons a day…

This rain falls on already damp red clay, on tomatoes and peppers that have had quite enough, thank you, on chickens who don’t seem to mind too much as long as it’s not a hurricane. The bees have tucked themselves away safely in their boxes. How dry and warm it must be inside, the air heavy with warmth and pollen and the hum of tens of thousands of wings.

Yesterday was a garden day, a yard day, a swimming pool day. A day to overdo the fresh air and sunshine, because really, such things cannot be overdone. Today is a day for tea and introspection, a day to draw back out of the elements and open a book of poetry.

There came a wind like a bugle

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

THERE came a wind like a bugle,
It quivered through the grass.
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass.
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
The doom’s electric moccason
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of passing trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!

Emily Dickinson

Today’s post is brought to you by the looming storm that has been creeping closer and closer all day, and which is now imminent: write a poem about a storm, using as many of the five senses as possible. Dickinson describes the look here quite fully, but she also gives us sound–the steeple bell–and feeling, too, in the green chill. How could you add taste or smell?