Longfellow's Grieving Sky

Out of the same bosom of air Longfellow descries the snow, so, too, comes the rain. It makes no difference that he had tread foot upon another's soil, for the air and the clouds that wear folds in their garments are not respecters of countries, near or far. And although his woodlands are not gum tree forests, and he finds them brown and bare in the harvest-fields far below him, the rain in Australia falls every bit as silently, softly, and slowly as his snow.

In his poem, "Snow-Flakes," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's fancies fall in flakes while our cloud's divine expression takes shape in the form of droplets that are not strangers to troubled hearts and the confessions they make, and the equally troubled sky of a thunderstorm in March reveals feelings of grief in its own non-frozen way.

Although my experience with poems of the air may now exclude the white countenance of blizzards and snowshowers, hail, and sleet, flurries and squalls, and sugar-coated fields, it does not skimp on poetic wax. Its slow syllables, round and plopping, know the same secret of despair as its silent melt-prone cousin. Long may the cloudy bosom hoard these tiny revelations of disparity, revealed in whispers that settle upon wood and field, as told by Longfellow, but just as long do the cloudy bosoms that swell and roll above paddock and bush, scrub and forest, hoard the more boisterous voice of an Australian summer shower.

I suppose all this just goes to show that clouds, no matter what they hold in the folds of their garments, whether it be rain or snow, hot or cold, they will never keep their despair to themselves. For always and everywhere, whether whispered, or howled, the sky will forever find a way to reveal its grief to the world.