The sounds of a glorious winter afternoon (the scream of a jay–cold, hard, tense, frozen music –like the winter sky)

February 12. 

February 12, 2023

I am not aware till I come out how pleasant a day it is. 

It was very cold this morning, and I have been putting on wood in vain to warm my chamber, and lo! I come forth, and am surprised to find it warm and pleasant. There is very little wind, here under Fair Haven especially. I begin to dream of summer even. I take off my mittens.

This is a glorious winter afternoon. The clearness of a winter day is not impaired, while the air is still and you feel a direct heat from the sun. It is not like the relenting of a thaw with a southerly wind. There is a bright sheen from the snow, and the ice booms a little from time to time. 

To make a perfect winter day like this, you must have a clear, sparkling air, with a sheen from the snow, sufficient cold, little or no wind; and the warmth must come directly from the sun. 

It must not be a thawing warmth. The tension of nature must not be relaxed. The earth must be resonant if bare.

You hear the lisping tinkle of chickadees from time to time and the unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold; hard, tense, frozen music, like the winter sky itself; in the blue livery of winter's band. It is like a flourish of trumpets to the winter sky. There is no hint of incubation in the jay's scream. Like the creak of a cart-wheel. 

There is no cushion for sounds now. They tear our ears. 

The pond does not thunder every night, and I do not know its law exactly. I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering, for it feels scarcely perceptible changes in the weather. Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should, as surely as the buds expand in the spring. 

For the earth is all alive and covered with feelers of sensation, papillae. The hardest and largest rock, the broadest ocean, is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube. 

Though you may perceive no difference in the weather, the pond does.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 12, 1854

I begin to dream of summer even. I take off my mittens. See January 25, 1855 ("It is a rare day for winter, clear and bright, yet warm . . .You dispense with gloves. "); March 18, 1853 ("This the foreglow of the year, when the walker goes home at eve to dream of summer”) Compare February 1, 1856 ("We have completely forgotten the summer."); February 3, 1852 ("See if a man can think his summer thoughts now.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of Spring: Walking without Gloves

This is a glorious winter afternoon. See December 10, 1856 ("A warm, clear, glorious winter day."); December 20, 1854 (“It has been a glorious winter day, its elements so simple, —the sharp clear air, the white snow everywhere covering the earth, and the polished ice.”)

The unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay. See February 2, 1854 ("The scream of the jay is a true winter sound. It is wholly without sentiment, and in harmony with winter.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Blue Jay

The pond does not thunder every night. See January 1, 1853 ("I listen to the booming of the pond as if it were a reasonable creature"); January 6, 1853 ("There are thirty or forty of these [ bubbles], at least, to every square inch. These, probably, when heated by the sun, make it crack and whoop.");. January 8, 1853 ("I inferred, therefore, that all those infinite minute bubbles I had seen first on the under side of the ice were now frozen in with it, and . . . probably it is the expanding and shrinking of the air in them, as well as in the water, which cracks the ice and makes the whooping sound."); January 29, 1853 ("Melvin thinks that the "thundering" of the pond scares the pickerel."); December 25, 1853 ('About 4 p. m. the sun sunk behind a cloud, and the pond began to boom or whoop. I noticed the same yesterday at the same hour at Flint's. It is a very pleasing phenomenon, so dependent on the altitude of the sun. "); December 27, 1853 ("I went to hear the pond whoop, but did not hear much. "); March 1,1856 ("At Flint’s I find half a dozen fishing. The pond cracks a very little while I am there, say at half past ten. I think I never saw the ice so thick. It measures just two feet thick"); December 7, 1856 ("I see with surprise the pond a dumb white surface of ice speckled with snow, just as so many winters before . . . I hear, too, the familiar belching voice of the pond. "); January 23, 1858 (“Walden, I think, begins to crack and boom first on the south side, which is first in the shade, for I hear it cracking there, though it is still in the sun around me. It is not so sonorous and like the dumping of frogs as I have heard it, but more like the cracking of crockery. It suggests the very brittlest material, as if the globe you stood on were a hollow sphere of glass and might fall to pieces on the slightest touch. Most shivering, splintery, screeching cracks these are, as if the ice were no thicker than a tumbler, though it is probably nine or ten inches. Methinks my weight sinks it and helps to crack sometimes."); January 23, 1858 ("I go near enough to Flint's Pond, about 4 P. M., to hear it thundering. In summer I should not have suspected its presence an eighth of a mile off through the woods, but in such a winter day as this it speaks and betrays itself. "); January 28, 1858 ("The ice cracks suddenly with a shivering jar like crockery or the brittlest material, such as it is. And I notice, as I sit here at this open edge, that each time the ice cracks, though it may be a good distance off toward the middle, the water here is very much agitated"); December 25, 1858 (“I stayed later to hear the pond crack, but it did not much. ”); December 23, 1859 ("You may walk eastward in the winter afternoon till the ice begins to look green, half to three quarters of an hour before sunset . . . Soon after, too, the ice began to boom, or fire its evening gun, another warning that the end of the day was at hand, and a little after the snow reflected a distinct rosy ligh, . . . These signs successively prompt us once more to retrace our steps. ")  See also Walden (“The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering . . . Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should”)

February 12. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 12

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  Sounds of a glorious winter afternoon

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season, 

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2024

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