'The Whole Sky Seems to Turn Into Rain'

The storm was brief and fierce. Wind pushed the rain horizontally, like an airborne river. The tops of newly planted trees touched the ground. Yard and street filled with branches, leaves and pine cones. A block away, an oak cracked and fell, blocking the street. We lost power at 6:25 p.m. Thursday and it was restored eighteen hours later – the fifth outage we’ve had in 2024. None rivalled the four-day loss of power during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, when I lost my car in the flooding. The sound of the storm was replaced on Friday by the drone of leaf-blowers and chainsaws. 

Following that earlier storm I reread C.H. Sisson’s translation of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, customarily rendered in English as On the Nature of Things. Sisson retained the concision of the original and its suggestion of scientific comprehensiveness. Lucretius (c. 99-c. 55 B.C.), a contemporary of Julius Caesar, was a proto-scientist. He writes a curiously unpopulated philosophical epic, one without an Achilles or Odysseus, and his description of a storm recalls what we witnessed on Thursday:

 

“Then a trembling seizes the earth and a murmur

Runs heavily through the sky; and the whole storm almost

Trembles as if it were shaken by the roaring:

The shock is followed by explosions of rain

So that the whole sky seems to turn into rain

And pouring down it calls back the time of the flood:

There is such a breaking of cloud and such bursts of wind

And the sound of thunder flies out of the burning strokes.”

 

In Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante,and Goethe (1910), George Santayana writes of the Roman poet:

 

“Poetic dominion over things as they are is seen best in Shakespeare for the ways of men, and in Lucretius for the ways of nature. Unapproachably vivid, relentless, direct in detail, he is unflinchingly grand and serious in his grouping of the facts. It is the truth that absorbs him and carries him along. He wishes us to be convinced and sobered by the fact, by the overwhelming evidence of thing after thing, raining down upon us, all bearing witness with one voice to the nature of the world.”