‘The emotion is to be found in the clouds,
not in the green solids of the sloping hills
or even in the gray signatures of rivers,
according to Constable, who was a student of clouds
and filled shelves of sketchbooks with their motion,
their lofty gesturing and sudden implication of weather.
Outdoors, he must have looked up thousands of times, his pencil trying to keep pace with their high voyaging
and the silent commotion of their eddying and flow.
Clouds would move beyond the outlines he would draw
as they moved within themselves, tumbling into their centers and swirling off at the burning edges in vapors
to dissipate into the universal blue of the sky.’
From ‘Student of Clouds’, a poem by former US laureate Billy Collins, first published in the collection Questions about Angels: Poems (1991).
Study of clouds over a landscape (likely 1820 or 1829) by John Constable, depicting Stratocumulus and Cumulus congestus clouds over Harnham Ridge, Salisbury, England. Thank you to Timothy Kessler (Member 45,331) for suggesting we quote Billy Collins’s poem in honour of this being the 250th anniversary year John Constable’s birth.
