Clouds

      I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
      From the seas and the streams... ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

      Clouds are visible masses of water droplets or frozen ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body. When the water in clouds becomes sufficiently condensed, it falls as rain.

      Sourced

      • I agree that clouds often look like other things — fish and unicorns and men on horseback — but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.
      • If you wish,
      I shall grow irreproachably tender:
      not a man, but a cloud in trousers!
      • Was I deceiv'd, or did a sable cloud
        Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
      • There does a sable cloud
        Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
        And casts a gleam over this tufted grove.
      • Choose a firm cloud before it fall, and in it
        Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute.
      • Do you see yonder cloud, that's almost in shape of a camel?
        By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
        Methinks it is like a weasel.
        It is backed like a weasel.
        Or, like a whale?
        Very like a whale.
      • …feathery curtains,
        Stretching o'er the sun's bright couch.
      • Far clouds of feathery gold,
        Shaded with deepest purple, gleam
        Like islands on a dark blue sea.
      • …fertile golden islands,
        Floating on a silver sea.
      • Once I beheld a sun, a sun which gilt
        That sable cloud, and turned it all to gold.
        • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night VII, line 815.

      The Cloud (1820)

      A poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley - Full text online
      I am the daughter of Earth and Water, and the nursling of the Sky;
      I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die.
      • I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
        From the seas and the streams;
        I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
        In their noonday dreams.
        From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
        The sweet buds every one,
        When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
        As she dances about the sun.
        I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
        And whiten the green plains under,
        And then again I dissolve it in rain,
        And laugh as I pass in thunder.
        • St. 1.
      • I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
        And the nursling of the Sky;
        I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
        I change, but I cannot die.
        • St. 7.
      • For after the rain when with never a stain
        The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
        And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
        Build up the blue dome of air,
        I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
        And out of the caverns of rain,
        Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
        I arise and unbuild it again.
        • St. 7 (A cenotaph is an empty tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person who is buried elsewhere).

      Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

      Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 122-23.
      • Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a Centaur, a Pard, or a Wolf, or a Bull?
        • Aristophanes, Clouds. Gerard's translation. (Compare Hamlet, III. 2).
      • Rocks, torrents, gulfs, and shapes of giant size
        And glitt'ring cliffs on cliffs, and fiery ramparts rise.
      • I saw two clouds at morning
        Tinged by the rising sun,
        And in the dawn they floated on
        And mingled into one.
        • John G. C. Brainard, I Saw Two Clouds at Morning.
      • Were I a cloud I'd gather
        My skirts up in the air,
        And fly I well know whither,
        And rest I well know where.
      • O, it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
        Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,
        To make the shifting clouds be what you please,
        Or let the easily persuaded eyes
        Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould
        Of a friend's fancy.
      • Our fathers were under the cloud.
        • I Corinthians. X. 1.
      • Though outwardly a gloomy shroud,
        The inner half of every cloud
        Is bright and shining:
        I therefore turn my clouds about
        And always wear them inside out
        To show the lining.
        • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Mrs. A. L. Felton), Wisdom of Folly.
      • The clouds,—the only birds that never sleep.
      • There ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand.
        • I Kings, XVIII. 44.
      • See yonder little cloud, that, borne aloft
        So tenderly by the wind, floats fast away
        Over the snowy peaks!
      • By unseen hands uplifted in the light
        Of sunset, yonder solitary cloud
        Floats, with its white apparel blown abroad,
        And wafted up to heaven.
      • But here by the mill the castled clouds
        Mocked themselves in the dizzy water.
        • E. L. Masters, Spoon River Anthology, Isaiah Beethoven.
      • So when the sun in bed,
        Curtain'd with cloudy red,
        Pillows his chin upon an orient wave.
      • If woolly fleeces spread the heavenly way
        No rain, be sure, disturbs the summer's day.
        • Old Weather Rhyme.
      • When clouds appear like rocks and towers,
        The earth's refreshed by frequent showers.
        • Old Weather Rhyme.
      • Clouds on clouds, in volumes driven,
        Curtain round the vault of heaven.
      • Who maketh the clouds his chariot.
        • Psalms. CIV. 3.
      • I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
        From the seas and the streams;
        I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
        In their noonday dreams.

        From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
        The sweet buds every one,
        When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
        As she dances about the sun.
        I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
        And whiten the green plains under,
        And then again I dissolve it in rain,
        And laugh as I pass in thunder.
      • Bathed in the tenderest purple of distance,
        Tinted and shadowed by pencils of air,
        Thy battlements hang o'er the slopes and the forests,
        Seats of the gods in the limitless ether,
        Looming sublimely aloft and afar.
      • Yonder cloud
        That rises upward always higher,
        And onward drags a laboring breast,
        And topples round the dreary west,
        A looming bastion fringed with fire.
      • The clouds that gather round the setting sun
        Do take a sober coloring from an eye
        That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.
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      Last modified on 9 January 2013, at 19:55