'Glowed with a Bright Halation'

Another new and poetically suggestive word: halation. I found it in an entry written on this date, Oct. 27, in 1929 (three days after the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression), in the journal of Charles Burchfield: “The woods are bare – the sunlight bright with scattered clouds – the southern horizon glowed with a bright halation.” Related to halo, the word is from the Greek by way of French, according to the OED. The etymology also notes that the Italian for halo is alone. I would love to see a poet play with this constellation of senses and sounds. 

Burchfield was a painter peculiarly sensitive to light as it changed through the day and year. You can understand his attraction to the notion of halation, defined by the OED as “a halo-like effect in which light spreads beyond the edges of a bright object.” Though usually applied to photography, we associate halation with the sun or moon as they shine with a luminous fuzziness, a diffuse coronal glow.

 

The Dictionary cites a passage from 1957 by E. S. De Maré in the journal Photography: “In the case of an east window in a church, halation can only be avoided entirely by lighting the interior wall around the window, so reducing the contrast.” The linkage of halation and church windows brought to mind the opening lines of Henry Vaughan’s “The World” (1650):

 

“I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright . . .”