Poetry is a phantom script
telling how
rainbows are made
and why they go away. --Carl Sandburg
Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life,
The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,
And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray!
--Byron, The Bride of Abydos, Canto i, st.20
When the rainbow arching high
Looks from the zenith round the sky
Lit with exquisite tints seven
Caught from angels' wings in heaven,
Double, and higher than his World
The wrought rim of heaven's font,
Then may I upwards gaze and see the deepening intensity
Of the air-blended diadem...
Ended in sweet uncertainty ' I wixt real hue and phantasy.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins, II Mystico 107-22
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So it was when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old.
Or let me die! -- Wordsworth
Along a parabola life like a rocket flies,
Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow.
-- Andrei Voznesensky, Parabolic Ballad
Such grace shall one just Man find in his sight,
That he relents, not to blot out mankind,
And makes a covenant never to destroy
The earth again by flood, nor rain to drown the world
With man therein of beast, but where he brings
Over the earth a cloud, with therein set
His triple-color'd bow, whereon to look
And can to mind his Covenant
--Milton, XI, 11 890-7
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
--William Shakespeare, King John
If I
could catch a rainbow
I would do it just for you
and share with you its beauty
On the days you're feeling blue.
--Anonymous
But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white--then melts forever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow's lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.
--Robert Burns,Tam O'Shanter: A Tale
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
--William Wordsworth (1770-1850),
Ode: Intimations of Immortality
from
Recollections of Early Childhood
When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead.
When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow�s glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are sooned forgot.
--Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Lines: When the Lamp
"RAIN, RAIN, AND SUN! A RAINBOW IN THE SKY!
A young man will be wiser by and by;
An old man's wit may wander ere he die.
Rain Rain and sun! a rainbow on the lea!
A truth is this to me, and that to thee:
And truth or clothed or naked be.
Rain, sun, and rain! and the free blossom blow;
Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows?
From the great deep to the great deep he goes."
--Tennyson, "The Coming of Arthur"
What skilful
limner e'er would choose
To paint the rainbow's varying hues,
Unless to mortal it were given
To dip his brush in the dyes of Heaven?
-- Sir Walter Scott,
Marmion, A Talke of
Flodden Field, 1809
As from the face of
heaven the scatter'd clouds
Tumultuous rove, th'interminable sky
Sublimer swells, and o'er the World expands
A purer azure. Through the lightened air
A higher lustre and a clearer calm
Diffusive tremble; while, as if in sign
Of danger past, a glittering robe of joy,
Set off abundant by the yellow ray,
Invests the fields, and nature smiles revived.
--James Thomson, The Seasons: Summer, 1727
He can behold
Things manifold
That have not been wholly told,--
Have not been wholly sung or said.
For his thought, that never stops,
Follows the water-drops
Down to the graves of the dead,
Down through chasms and gulfs profound,
To the dreary fountain-head
Of lakes and rivers under ground;
And sees them, when the rain is done,
On the bridge of colors seven
Climbing up once more to heaven,
Opposite the setting sun.
Thus the Seer,
With vision clear,
Sees forms appear and disappear,
In the perpetual round of strange,
Mysterious change
From birth to death, from death to birth,
From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth;
Till glimpses more sublime
Of things unseen before,
Unto his wondering eyes reveal
The Universe, as an immeasurable wheel
Turning forevermore
Into the rapid and rushing river of Time
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Do not all charms
fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in
heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine--
Unweave a rainbow.
-- John Keats, Lamia, 1820
We shall find the cube of the
rainbow,
Of that there is no doubt;
But the arc of a lover's conjecture
Eludes the finding out.
-- Emily Dickinson
It changed of
course -- a heavenly chameleon,
The airy child of vapour and the sun,
Brought forth in purple, cradled in vermilion,
Baptized in molten gold and swathed in dun,
Glittering like crescents o'er a Turk's pavilion
And blending every colour into one...
Our shipwrecked
seamen thought it a good omen;
It is as well to think so now and then.
'Twas an old custom of the Greek and Roman,
And may become of great advantage when
Folks are discouraged; and most surely no men
Had greater need to nerve themselves again
Than those, and so this rainbow looked like hope,
Quite a celestial kaleidoscope.
--George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto II, 1819
You may grind their souls in the
selfsame mill,
You may bind them, heart and brow;
But the poet will follow the rainbow still,
And his brother will follow the plow.
-John Boyle O'Reilly, The Rainbow's Treasure
Over her hung a canopy of state,
Not of rich tissue, nor of spangled gold,
But of a substance, though not animate,
Yet of a heavenly and spiritual mould,
That only eyes of spirits might behold.
--Giles Fletcher, The Rainbow
