anthonyhowelljournal

Petition to make a Cloud Garden in Luke Howard’s House – The ‘Namer of Clouds’ resided in Bruce Grove, off Tottenham High Street. Here is a poem Goethe wrote to him.

CLOUD FORMS

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When, from the water’s quiet mirror,

A mist floats off like a carpet

And the moon, wrapped in its undulations,

Revels in their haunted, haunting play,

Then we are pleased as children;

Watching it lift up the mountain,

Deepen and then spread,

Bar after bar, to become the sort

Of lowering sky that can go either way:

Soak us or pass on, overhead.

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And if from there it should be raised

Up to a thinner atmosphere

How firmly based, how crisp it seems,

Towering, gathering all its splendour

For a proclamation on the plenitude of power

(Since what we fear may well be our fate).

We tremble in the shadow of its threatening.

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Say it climbs higher still;

The threat now utterly removed

Into a heavenly lightness,

A mere something there that dissolves

Ever so softly; less than a patter of fleeces

Moving, deliciously combed,

Upwards from below, towards

Their Shepherd, into his lap and hand.

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Yet all must be brought down

By the weight of our world.

Pierced, when dense and very large,

The stack must thunderously

Discharge, as armies do that roll out

In splendid array only to disintegrate;

The earth then receiving their remains.

But keep the eye on where it frays,

Describing what comes down while feeling

That it’s upwards we should always gaze.

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After Goethe –  stratus, cumulus, cirrus, nimbus