Today is the anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens. In Henry IV, part 1, one of the most notable of my Cymric ancestors gets a pie in the face.
* Glendower. I cannot blame him: at my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shaked like a coward.
* Hotspur. Why, so it would have done at the same season, if
your mother's cat had but kittened, though yourself
had never been born.
* Glendower. I say the earth did shake when I was born.
* Hotspur. And I say the earth was not of my mind,
If you suppose as fearing you it shook.
* Glendower. The heavens were all on fire, the earth did tremble.
* Hotspur. O, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire,
And not in fear of your nativity.
Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch'd and vex'd
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam earth and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth
Our grandam earth, having this distemperature,
In passion shook.
2 comments:
Fascinating pathology.
we're going to play a NEW GAME...
No, YOU are going to play a new game. We're adults and have better things to do with our time.
The photo essay at boston dot com brought home the eruption in a way that I never really understood at the time it happened. I knew it was big. I saw a few photos. I knew the effects were huge...but to see those photos was humbling. We are so insignificant, no matter how much we screw up the air, water and earth. The Earth with its geological processes will be here l-o-n-g after we're gone.
Post a Comment