|  One
of the objectives of this series of Poems of the Week has been
to support our series of articles on writing poetry, So You
Want to be a Poet, and the specific target is to suggest possible
subjects for the poet. I will have more to say about this aspect
in the near future! You will have seen that I have selected various
phases of the weather: winds, sunshine, rain; and the seasons:
and this week is a further subject of this group – thunder.
Now actually thunder is a manifestation of electrical activity
in clouds, and the sound of thunder is that of the spark represented
by lightning, exactly the same as the crack of the spark you hear
if you need to start your car when the battery is dead using a
friend’s jumper cables. However, because the distances are considerably
greater, and the velocity of light is much greater than the velocity
of sound, the flash of lightning and the boom of the thunder are
sufficiently separated that the ancients regarded them as two
different phenomena; the fact that other clouds may obscure the
flash but the thunder is always heard can heighten this perception.
In some of the early religions the gods of thunder and lightning
were two different entities. Even in modern times, this separation
is apparent: here is Mark Twain (1935 – 1910) in a letter to an
Unidentified Person [August 28, 1908]: "Thunder is good,
thunder is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work."
Lord Macaulay (1800 – 1859) remarks, in an article on Mr. Robert
 Montgomery’s
Poems, “His theory is therefore this, that God made the thunder,
but that the lightning made itself.”
For the poet, often the image of thunder as the ‘great voice’
is used: here is Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) speaking of
John Keats in Adonais (1821):
He is made one with nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird.
Shelley also has, in The
Cloud:
I wield the flail of the flashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
Another image: this from Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 – 1909),
in Laus Veneris:
Until God loosen over sea and land
The thunder of the trumpets of the night.
I have occasion to fly on commercial airlines fairly frequently,
and I always try to get a window seat, because the views outside
are often extraordinary visions of the world. This is true of
the great thunder clouds: they seem to sail like enormous galleons
through the angry sky, with the bright lines of lightning like
a sparse beard at their leading edge. In terms of the way the
electric current flows, lightning can strike both down from the
cloud to the ground, or up from the ground to the cloud. The relative
frequency of the direction of the strike varies in different parts
of the country, curiously enough.
 The
power within a lightning strike is very considerable— if
Benjamin Franklin had any idea how great it could be, I don’t
think he would have flown his kite so casually! However, this
really rather daring experiment led to his suggestion for the
use of lightning rods on tall structures, with a low resistance
path to an earth ground to prevent the energy from passing through
the structure and causing a fire.
Here is a fragment of a poem by Robinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962)
called Love the Wild Swan. Jeffers was a remarkable man.
His father, a professor of Old Testament Literature and Biblical
History at Western Theology Seminary in Pittsburgh, supervised
Jeffers's education, and Robinson began to learn Greek at the
age of five. His early lessons were soon followed by travel in
Europe, which included schooling at Zurich, Leipzig, and Geneva.
When the family moved to California, Jeffers, at age sixteen,
entered Occidental College as a junior. He graduated in 1905 at
the age of eighteen.
Jeffers immediately entered graduate school as a student of
literature at the University of Southern California. In spring
of 1906, he was back in Switzerland studying philosophy, Old English,
French literary history, Dante, Spanish romantic poetry, and the
history of the Roman Empire. Returning to USC in September 1907,
he was admitted to the medical school. The last of his formal
education took place at the University of Washington, where he
studied forestry.
 After
marrying in 1913, Jeffers moved to Carmel, California, and in
1919 he began building a stone cottage on land overlooking Carmel
Bay and facing Point Lobos.
Jeffers brought enormous learning in literature, religion, philosophy,
languages, myth, and sciences to his poetry. He believed that
human beings had developed an insanely self-centered view of the
world, and felt passionately that we must learn to have greater
respect for the rest of creation.
-This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.
In Paradise Lost, Book II, Satan is proposing to the assembly
of the fallen angels that one of their number should attempt to
reenter heaven to find out if another battle might improve their
lot. They agree, but aware of the profound danger of such an excursion,
no volunteer comes forward. Satan himself takes on the responsibility,
and tells them that no-one may accompany him. This receives acclaim;
the assembly rose as one:
But they
Dreaded not more th’adventure than his voice
Forbidding; and at once with him they rose;
Their rising all at once was as the sound
Of Thunder heard remote. Towards him they bend
With awful reverence prone; and as a God
Extol him equal to the highest in Heav’n:
John Milton (1608 – 1674) (of course!).
And Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Act IV, Scene I, Lines 117 – 123: Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons,
betrothed to Theseus, Duke of Athens, says:
I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear
With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for, besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem all one mutual cry: I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
But, of course, Shakespeare’s most memorable invocation of a
thunderstorm comes in the opening lines to Macbeth. Act I, Scene
I; “An Open Place. Thunder and Lightning. Enter three WITCHES.”
FIRST WITCH.
When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
SECOND WITCH.
When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
We have quoted Byron many times in these pages. Matthew Arnold
(1822 – 1888) had this to say about him, in Memorial Verses:
When Byron’s eyes were shut in death,
We bow’d our head and held our breath.
He taught us little: but our soul
Had felt him like the thunder’s roll.
Hiram Power’s sculpture "The Greek Slave" caused much
controversy during the Great Exhibition of 1851. It remains controversial
today; in a 1999 article in the Yale Daily News, Grace Farrell
argues that the nude statue's "submissively bowed head not
only made the act of gazing at an erotically beautiful, nude woman
socially acceptable, but it invested female sexuality with a dramatically
emotional quotient of subservience." Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806 – 1861) wrote a powerful
sonnet about this figure, standing with her hands chained,
and this will be our first poem of this week.
 While
I was looking through the sources, I came across another interesting
sonnet, by Scottish poet Andrew Lang (1844 – 1912). Lang's interests
were diverse and his expertise considerable. He wrote many elegantly
put together books which were, and are, a delight to read. His
intellect and his wit can perhaps be best appreciated in Adventures
among books. A Snell exhibitioner at Balliol, he became a fellow
of Merton College, Oxford, and a distinguished classical scholar
who
se versions of the Odyssey (1879), and the Iliad
(1882), are still highly regarded. However, one of the comments
made about him was “What Lang singularly failed to do was to write
either a lasting novel or a really striking poem, but he was a
very significant literary figure”. Damning with faint praise is
the phrase that leaps to mind, but it illustrates the high standards
that are demanded in the area of creative writing! Anyway, you
can make your own minds up, because our second poem of the week
is his As One That
for a Weary Space has Lain.
My last poem of this week will be one I quoted from briefly
quite recently. It is from Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936), and
it describes the memories of a British soldier who spent some
interesting times somewhere on the road to Mandalay.
It’s a little difficult to make out the geography, because it
mentions Rangoon, which is on the coast of the Andaman Sea; but
Mandalay itself is due north on the Irawaddy River (now written
Ayeyarwady) some 300 miles away, and nowhere near the sea. Burma
is now Myanmar, of course; but how one can look anywhere to the
east and sea China across the bay beats me.
But hey! It’s a great poem!
Hope you enjoy these. And remember that as long ago as the first
century A.D., Manilius remarked in Astronomica, i. 104. of human
intelligence: "Eripuitque Jovi fulmen viresque tonandi."
Which, as we all know, means: "And snatched from Jove the
lightning shaft and the power to thunder."
And you thought you were going to get away without a Latin tag
this week?
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