—Rainbow—
The Darkness and the Light
A rainbow at its root
Is black as soot
Impalpable and mute
As from a lofty butte
Day from darkness softly breaks
With myriad colors iridescent as fruit.
A rainbow’s two vectors end not at the ground
But curve darkly down and underground,
Then up to form a dipolar halo—O! so round.
and know that O
est toujours eau
or H2O
And that water and light yearn to exist
As saturation of colors in twists of mist.
Colors so mellow:
Red, orange, yellow,
Sun splashed and skylit:
Green, blue, and violet,
In a soft shimmering band
Arcing high over the land.
Its colors hymning and humming
In unison and orisons of becoming,
A weaving of sunshine and mazuresty,
Asking only that we pause, let it be.
It is withal wondrously wrought
Numinous, nebulous, and naught,
With something sometimes forgot:
That it is never a thing but a thought.
Then tarry there a while and know,
And marvel, as these words echo:
Look! Look! There’s a Rainbow!
—Hyatt Carter
———————————————
An enlightening note on the darkness and the light:
Goethe’s way of seeing enabled him to discover that Newton was mistaken about one of his basic ideas in optics. From his experiments with a prism, Newton’s view was that light contains the seven colors of the spectrum and that the prism only makes visible what is invisibly contained within light itself.
However, when Goethe first looked through a prism, he was taken aback at what he saw and he immediately exclaimed, “Newton is wrong!”
Looking at a white wall through the prism, Goethe saw no colors whatsoever; but turning his gaze to the window where the dark frames around the window panes stood out against the bright sky outside, along the edge of the frames, at the intersection of darkness and light, colors suddenly blossomed before his eyes. And, as he continued to investigate this, he came to clearly see that prismatic colors arise from the creative interplay of darkness and light. Colors were thus the creation of what is perhaps the most fundamental polarity, with darkness shining every bit as darkly as light shines brightly.
With eyes made keen by his method, Goethe also discerned an archetypal example of this that is right before our eyes every day in the natural world. At dawn or dusk, with the rising or setting sun, the horizon shines with the warm colors of the spectrum (red, orange, and yellow) while in full daylight the sky overhead shimmers with the cool colors of green, blue, and violet.
Source:
Hyatt Carter, “Goethe’s Way of Seeing: The Science and the Poetics of Perception.”
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
—William Wordsworth
Charles Hartshorne, The Darkness and the Light: A Philosopher Reflects Upon His Fortunate Career and Those Who Made It Possible