“Suns Were Everywhere” – How Fordham English Spent the Eclipse
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-44237
By Meghan Maguire Dahn
Some people prepare for an astronomical event like the April 8th solar eclipse by talking to the physics enthusiasts in their lives. Other people order special filters for their telescopes or find the best glasses to wear for the event. Some people make playlists or eclipse-adjacent amuse-bouches. We at Fordham English hit the books.
A quick survey of the literature shows that many writers have taken up the task of eclipse écriture. And why not? If we need light to write (a fact that has always made Moby-Dick particularly poignant to me, since whaling is concerned with securing fuel for light), of course an event that would take the light from the day would be of interest. Speaking of Moby-Dick, Melville filled that book with images of light and darkness, veils and masks, making the sun something to “strike,” as Ahab says, if it insults you.
Overwhelmingly, eclipses appear in literature as ominous. In Paradise Lost, Milton uses the image of an eclipse to describe Satan’s appearance “[as] when the Sun new-risen / Looks through the horizontal misty air / Shorn of his beams, or, from behind the Moon / In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds / On half the nations, and with fear of change / Perplexes Monarchs.” Perhaps the most perplexed monarch in all of English literature, King Lear, also lives through an eclipse, of which Gloster notes that “[t]hese late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.” For an example of these bad feelings in action, look no further than Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which describes “the falling of the first shadow of that darkness [when] you shall see them go mad with fear. You could see the shudder sweep the mass like a wave.” Even a far more contemporary essay, “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard, treats the event with suspicion. She writes:
I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were now platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were fine-spun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.
A similar urge to return to one’s own daily life, despite an appetite for wonder, appears in one of James Fenimore Cooper’s letters, published posthumously by his daughter, the esteemed nature writer Susan Fenimore Cooper. Cooper recollects the general excitement leading up to the eclipse, writing that his family members “were all exulting in the feeling that a grand and extraordinary spectacle awaited [them].” He writes of the ideal location of his home, with its “lake, river, mountain, wood, and the dwellings of man, to give full effect to the varied movement of light and shadow through that impressive day.” And yet, when it comes to actually describing the eclipse, he exhibits his discomfort with it, writing that “a sombre [sic.], yellowish unnatural coloring was shed over the country” and that “a great change had taken place.” He goes on to describe the landscape in strikingly similar language to Dillard’s:
The trees on the distant heights had lost their verdure and their airy character; they were taking the outline of dark pictures graven upon an unfamiliar sky. The lake wore a lurid aspect, very unusual. All living creatures seemed thrown into a state of agitation. The birds were fluttering to and fro, in great excitement; they seemed to mistrust that this was not the gradual approach of evening, and were undecided in their movements. Even the dogs – honest creatures – became uneasy, and drew closer to their masters.
Cooper found the eclipse to be humbling, a reminder of the smallness of humankind. This is a sentiment that we can see, too, in Virginia Woolf’s recollections of an eclipse. She writes that she “had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came.” Later, she writes that the colors “came back astonishingly lightly and quickly and beautifully in the valley and over the hills — at first with a miraculous glittering and ethereality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief.” The return of color, the glittering aspect of the landscape, recalls Emily Dickinson’s observation that “Nature was in an Opal Apron.” But if “Awe – was all we could feel,” according to Dickinson, Woolf writes that it “was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. This was within the power of nature.”
There are some writers, though, who sustain their wonder at the eclipse. Thomas Hardy writes of “imperturbable serenity,” later likening the return of color to the sky to “fair maidens.” Poet Deborah Trustman writes that although “birds nest at midday, chirp night / songs in midday twilight–night / without sunset, the sun noon / high, bruised black by the moon,” that the uncanniness of that takes place when “Planets/ perfectly align for three long / minutes, as long as a song.” Perhaps the writer that exhibits the greatest fellow-feeling of this whole group is Robert Bly (father of English Department Chair Mary Bly!) who, in “Seeing the Eclipse in Maine,” describes how “[we] saw on a rock underneath a fir tree, / Dozens of crescents—made the same way— / Thousands! Even our straw hats produced / A few as we moved them over the bare granite.” He closes the poem with a scene of camaraderie: “We shared chocolate, and one man from Maine / Told a joke. Suns were everywhere—at our feet.”
At Fordham, we celebrated with the feeling of suns “everywhere – at our feet.” Classes met outside, as you can see here with Professor Stacey D’Erasmo’s graduate seminar.
Professor Stacey D’Erasmo’s graduate seminar met outside during the solar eclipse. Photo credit: Hayley Blair, English MA student at Fordham
And our staff and faculty spent time outside together in the joy of each other’s company.
English Department faculty and staff enjoying the eclipse.
We hope that you, too, had your share of this feeling of wonder. And if you find any eclipse quotes, send them our way!
Works Cited
Bly, Robert. “Seeing the Eclipse in Maine.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51207/seeing-the-eclipse-in-maine. Accessed 23 April 2024.
Cooper, James Fenimore. “The Eclipse.” Americanliterature.com, https://americanliterature.com/author/james-fenimore-cooper/short-story/the-eclipse. Accessed 23 April 2024.
Dickinson, Emily. “[It Sounded as if the Streets were Running] 1454” in The Poems of Emily Dickinson. R. W. Franklin, ed., the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. p. 548.
Dillard, Annie. “Total Eclipse” in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters. Harper Perennial, 1992. pp. 9-28.
Hardy, Thomas. The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy. Michael Irwin, ed., Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2002.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker, eds., Norton Critical Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 1967.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Dennis Danielson, ed., Parallel Prose Edition, Broadview Press, 2012.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear. Grace Ioppolo, ed., Norton Critical Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.
Trustman, Deborah. “The Eclipse.” Poetry Foundation, December 1975. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=33281. Accessed 23 April 2024.
Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Allison R. Ensor, ed., Norton Critical Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.
Woolf, Virginia. A Writer’s Diary. Leonard Woolf, ed., Harcourt, Brace, 1954.
Meghan Maguire Dahn is a Lecturer in English at Fordham University, where she is also the Editor of English News. She is the author of Domain, a collection of poems, as well as the chapbook Lucid Animal. If you have English-related news you’d like to share with her, please feel free to email her at mdahn@fordham.edu.