The Creation of Eden

le  premier  soleil   sur le  premier  matin

-- Charles Péguy, Eve

Subsequent manifestations:

By this time, the eastern sky  was gorgeous with light

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

Even before the sun gave light, dead day was creeping  from bush to bush,  watching man.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

the washed-out, bird-bedeviled dawn

-- T.  Coraghessan Boyle,  World’s End (1987), p. 17

Light upon White

low-hung, blazing,  the stars light the sky,

and over the diamond-dusted snow-crust

the  moon beams       splinter.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

Midwest Monostich

trailing        veils           of  rain    .  .   .    .

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

 .

.

.

Dakota Winter

Ever restlessly moving West, the young Wisconsin native  winds up in as-yet-untamed  Dakota:

Level as a floor,  these acres were,

and dotted with the  bones  of bison.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), p. 244

Sufficiently disheartening.  Yet how much moreso, as the season grew bitter, and those bleached bones  proved the only bulwark against death by freezing:

Winter!  No man knows what winter means 

until he has lived through one  in a pine-board shanty

on a Dakota plain 

with only buffalo-bones  for fuel.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), p. 248

Dakota Summer

Apprehension on the prairie,

amid frightening light:

An ominous change had crept over the plain.

The winds were hot and dry,

and the grass, baked on the stem,

 had become as inflammable as hay.

The birds

were  silent .

The sky, absolutely cloudless,

began to scare us with its light.

The sun rose through the dusty air,

sinister  with flare  of horizontal heat.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), p. 247

Glimpses of Sick Light

Chicago on fire,  seen from afar:

the thickening haze

through which the sun shone

with a hellish red glare

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

In the red darkness

glinted

innumerable rubies

-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932), ch. 3 

(In context, the implication is likewise hellish,
 since the locale is the laboratory manufacturing babies.)

Dust Bowl:

In the spring of 1934, only sun, and no rain … A powder of humus and colloids, the topsoil of the country  blowing away.  And still the sullen sun shone.

On and on  the clouds whirled, some into the astonished East, spreading their baleful orange and amber aura.

-- Arthur Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal (1959), p. 69

Note: “baleful” is an apt adjective here, as it echos the word balefire.

Compare, during an eruption of Vesuvius:

A lurid, baleful light  hung in the heavens.

-- Washington Irving, “The Story of the Young Italian.

The sky, darkened by moving storm clouds

was one of those invented by Gustave Doré

to emphasize important Biblical calamities.

A colorless light   filled  the empty quay.

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch.5

Midwest Morning monostich

hawks

hung

in the air

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

Moving-West Monostichs

the poetry  of unplowed   spaces

…

this  shelterless   sweep      of prairie

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

1-wd poem

Caledonia!

For years    that word

was a poem in my ear.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

Threshing-Day at Dawn

[A farm in Wisconsin, late 1800s.]

the east

began to bloom,

and long streamers  of red   began to  un  roll ll ll l

along the vast gray dome  of sky

[from: Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), chapter V]

Requiescat illa in pace

She passed to her final sleep   in silent dignity

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

Coming-of-Age on a Wisconsin Farm, 1860s

Coming-of-Age on a Wisconsin Farm, 1860s

Month by month,   the universe in which I lived

lightened     and       widened 

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)