`But Who Looks East at Sunset?'

One of the rare blessings associated with living in Houston, the sixth-most polluted city in the United States, is the frequency of spectacular sunrises and sunsets. Often grandiose in design – immense, textured, multi-layered flotillas of garishly colorful clouds and back-lighting – they are, in a word, Turneresque, with special effects by Maxfield Parrish. Even my kids will notice a notably conspicuous sunrise, and argue over who saw it first.

I started thinking about sunrises and sunsets while reading The Lyttleton Hart-Davis Letters, because Rupert Hart-Davis, in 1955, briefly inherited the job of editing The Note-books of Gerard Manley Hopkins, after the death of his friend, Humphrey House, for whom he served as literary executor. Eventually, he turned the task over to another scholar, Graham Storey, who later became known for editing Dickens’ letters. I have a copy of The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which Storey published in 1959 with Oxford University Press, and was browsing through it the other day when I found this 1873 entry from Hopkins’ journal:

“Fine sunset Nov. 3 -- Balks of grey cloud searched with long crimsonings running along their hanging folds – this from the lecture room window. A few minutes later the brightness over; one great dull rope coiling overhead sidelong from the sunset, its dewlaps and bellyings painted with a maddery campion-colour that seemed to stoop and drop like sopped cake; the further balk great gutterings and ropings, gilded above, jotted with a more bleedings red beneath and then a juicy tawny `clear’ below, which now is glowing orange and the full moon is rising over the house.”

This is less a naturalistic description of a natural event than a linguistic workout by a young, word-besotted poet (Hopkins was 29, and died at 44). Note the unexpected verbs, gerund strings, consonant clusters (“campion-colour”) and other hints of his later verse. Hopkins continued to take what might be called a “scientific” interest in celestial events. In 1882, in the letters column of the journal Nature, amateur and professional observers began reporting on the phenomenon of rayons du crepuscule, dark beams observed in the eastern sky after sunset. In November, Nature published a letter from the young Jesuit in which he reported having seen the crepuscular shadows in the east. He observed:

“There seems to be no reason why the phenomenon should not be common, and perhaps if looked out for it would be found to be. But who looks east at sunset? Something in the same way everybody has seen the rainbow; but the solar halo, which is really commoner, few people, not readers of scientific works, have ever seen at all. The appearance in question is due to cloud-shadows in an unusual perspective and in a clear sky; now shadow may not only be seen carried by misty, mealy, dusty, or smoky air near the ground, but even almost every bright day, by seemingly clear air high overhead.”

Hopkins’ explanation of the phenomenon sounds convincing, and he poses a delightful question: “But who looks east at sunset?” Poets of genius, obviously, and the scientifically minded in general. A year later, Hopkins wrote a second letter to Nature in which he stresses the importance of the observer’s perspective in describing natural phenomenon. He writes:

“Yesterday the sky was striped with cirrus cloud like the swaths of a hayfield; only in the east there was a bay or reach of clear blue sky, and in this the shadow-beams appeared, slender, colorless, and radiating every way like a fan wide open.”

Now geology joins optics and meteorology. On Aug. 26-27, 1883, a volcano on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa erupted, sending some 25 cubic kilometers of rock and ash into the atmosphere. For months, spectacular sunrises and sunsets, often blue or green, were reported around the globe, and the phenomenon and its relation to the eruption were hotly debated in Nature and other scientific journals. Eventually, scientists generally agreed with the explanation offered by Norman Lockyer, the founding editor of Nature, who theorized that moisture and particulate matter in the atmosphere obscured various bands in the spectrum of sunlight. In January 1884, Hopkins wrote a letter to Nature in which he attacked the theory of C. Piazzi Smyth, the astronomer royal of Scotland. The letter is lengthy, detailed and aggressive. Most interesting to readers of his poetry are Hopkins’ painterly descriptions of sunsets, in which “the green is between apple-green or pea-green (which are pure greens) and an olive (which is tertiary color).” He also observes that the post-volcanic sunsets can be distinguished from earlier ones

“in the nature of the glow, which is both intense and lusterless, and that both in the sky and in the earth. The glow is intense, this is what strikes everyone; it has prolonged the daylight, and optically changed the season; it bathes the whole sky, it is mistaken for the reflection of a great fire; at the sundown itself and southwards from that on December 4, I took a note of it as more like inflamed flesh than the lucid reads of ordinary sunsets. On the same evening the fields facing west glowed as if overlaid with yellow wax.”

In 1888, when the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society published its report, The Eruption of Krakatoa and Subsequent Phenomena, it reproduced much of Hopkins’ letter. I’ve often observed in Houston a phenomenon similar to the poet’s yellow-wax glow. Just before rain falls, or during a pause in a storm, when the sky typically is overcast but not black, the air will glow with a pale yellow light. The effect is eerie and dreamlike. Objects appear more vivid, as though in contrast to the yellow light. The effect is fleeting but memorable. In the letter already cited, Hopkins further describes such lighting:

“The two things together, that is intensity of light and want of luster, give to objects on the earth the peculiar illumination which may be seen in studios and other well-like rooms, and which itself affects the practice of painters and may be seen in their works, notably Rembrandt’s, disguising or freely showing the outlines or distinctions of things, but fetching out white surfaces and colored stuffs with a rich inward and seemingly self-luminous glow.”

In passages like this – and readers can find their own in Ruskin, Thoreau and Nabokov – the arbitrary distinctions between science and art disappear. Hopkins’ final letter to Nature, written Oct. 30, 1884, is more scientific and less artistic than the others. It is also more polemical. Dismissing the theories of Smyth and a painter allied with him, Robert C. Leslie, Hopkins writes:

“To set down variations in light and heat to changes in the sun when they may be explained by changes in our atmosphere, is like preferring the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system.”

Clouds, skyscapes and sunsets often show up in Hopkins’ poetry, but my favorite is the opening of “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection,” from 1888:

“Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs they throng; they glitter in marches.”