Rainbows

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Rainbows

Rainbows are nice, and no one has to sign up with Mega-Tentacle Wireless to see one.

At the beginning of Lent the matter of the rainbow in Genesis 9:11 is often one of the appointed readings:

I will establish my covenant with you, and all flesh shall be no more destroyed with the waters of a flood, neither shall there be from henceforth a flood to waste the earth. And God said: This is the sign of the covenant which I give between me and you, and to every living soul that is with you, for perpetual generations. I will set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be the sign of a covenant between me, and between the earth. And when I shall cover the sky with clouds, my bow shall appear in the clouds: And I will remember my covenant with you, and with every living soul that beareth flesh: and there shall no more be waters of a flood to destroy all flesh.

Although the Romantics (with a capital ‘R’), were usually hostile to revealed religion, Wordsworth is one of the more congenial and accessible of that rowdy lot. In one of his first poems he connects the rainbow with humanity:

“My Heart Leaps Up”

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So let it be when I shall grow old
Or let me die!
The child is father of the man:
And I would wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

In this little poem of indeterminate line, meter, and rhyme, Wordsworth connects the rainbow intimately to three ages of a man’s life on earth: childhood, maturity, and old age. The adult speaker delights in rainbows just as he did when he was a little boy, and hopes that he always will. He maintains that the joys of childhood are important to the development of the man, and that these joys are part of a life of harmony and balance, or “natural piety.”

Rainbows aren’t scheduled. They appear at will, usually around dusk on a rain spring or summer day, and then disappear quickly. Langston Hughes says that “Poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.” Conversely, rainbows are like poems. To go for the camera is to lose the rainbow, and even if not, the pictures of the rainbow don’t really match the real rainbow. Might as well catch the Wordsworthian moment while it lasts.

And, as Christina Rossetti says,

There are bridges on the rivers,
As pretty as you please;
But the bow that bridges heaven,
And overtops the trees,
And builds a road from earth to sky,
Is prettier far than these

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