"Expectation may amount to prophecy": April - Henry David Thoreau
Our monthly foray into Henry David Thoreau's The Journal: 1837–1861, a text perhaps more applicable at this time than ever. For this month, we have a passage from April 2, 1852. Thoreau was thirty-four years old.
April 2. 6 A.M.—The sun is up. The air is full of the notes of birds,—song sparrows, red-wings, robins (singing a strain), bluebirds—and I hear also a lark,—as if all the earth had burst forth into song. A few weeks ago, before the birds had come, there came to my mind in the night the twittering sound of birds in the early dawn of a spring morning, a semiprophecy of it, and last night I attended mentally as if I heard the spray-like dreaming sound of the mid-summer frog and realized how glorious and full of revelations it was. Expectation may amount to prophecy. The clouds are white watery, not such as we had in the winter.
Painting: Songbirds in a Woodland Marsh, Fidelia Bridges, 1879, oil on canvas.
No comments:
Post a Comment