As I mentioned last week, I recently read finished re-reading
David Copperfield. When I came to Chapter 55, titled “Tempest,” I was swept
up in Dickens’ description of a powerful storm. The highest praise I can give
him is to reproduce excerpts here for your reading enjoyment.
To set the stage, these first passages occur while David
Copperfield is traveling from London to Yarmouth on the evening mail coach.
It was a
murky confusion—here and there blotted with a colour like the colour of the
smoke from damp fuel—of flying clouds, tossed up into most remarkable heaps,
suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to
the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon
seemed to plunge headlong, as it, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature,
she had lost her way and were frightened. …
But, as
the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely over-spreading the whole
sky, then very dark, it came on to blow, harder and harder. It still increased,
until our horses could scarcely face the wind. Many times, in the dark part of
the night (it was then late in September, when the nights were not short), the
leaders turned about, or came to a dead stop; and we were often in serious
apprehension that the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up
before this storm, like showers of steel; and, at those times, when there was
any shelter of trees or lee walls to be got, we were fain to stop, in a sheer
impossibility of continuing the struggle.
…
As we
struggled on, nearer and nearer to the sea, from which this mighty wind was
blowing dead on shore, its force became more and more terrific. Long before we
saw the sea, its spray was on our lips, and showered salt rain upon us. The
water was out, over miles and miles of the flat country adjacent to Yarmouth;
and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had it stress of little
breakers setting heavily towards us. When we came within sight of the sea, the
waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like
glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.
Upon reaching Yarmouth, David took a room at an inn
and went down to the shore for a closer look.
Coming
near the beach, I saw, not only the boatmen, but half the people of the town,
lurking behind buildings; some, now and then braving the fury of the storm to
look away to sea, and blown sheer out of their course in trying to get zigzag
back.
…
The
tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to look at it, in the
agitation of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, and the awful
noise, confounded me. As the high watery walls came rolling in, and, at their
highest, tumbled back with a hoarse roar, it seemed to scoop out deep caves in
the beach, as if its purpose were to undermine the earth. When some
white-headed billows thundered on, and dashed themselves to pieces before they
reached the land, every fragment of the late whole seemed possessed by the full
might of its wrath, rushing to be gathered to the composition of another monster.
Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with a solitary
storm-bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted up to hills; masses of
water shivered and shook the beach with a booming sound; every shape
tumultuously rolled on, as soon as made, to change its shape and place, and
beat another shape and place away; the ideal shore on the horizon, with its
towers and buildings, rose and fell; the clouds fell fast and thick; I seemed
to see a rendering and upheaving of all nature.
I wish I
could write like that.
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