Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, August 17, 1914

August 17, 1914

     Sometime before daylight the rain came - a cairn steady soft shower, which comes early in the morning. At noon the sky clears. Air neutral.

     After supper to Three Trees to sketch.

     August is preeminently the month of colors - both intense vivid colors, and dreamy tints. Every known color exists in the August evening sky in some tint or shade. On earth there are myriad shades of yellow and green  and in the woods we find flaring yellows, purple & pink & white - but the August sky! That surpasses all. It is a if the complexity of Nature at this season were some how reflected there.

      I know of few things so stirring as the poetry of distance. To look out over an illimitable space towards the horizon and behold the succession of overlapping trees, blackish green close at hand, fading by almost imperceptable degrees into the sky - life holds few greater beauties. August as a sultry month, to be dreaded, deemed so by the unthinking unseeing unhearing popular mind.

...exists only perhaps just at noon. Poetry finds beauty at that time, but it needs not poetry to worship the August morning or evening, tho the poet reaps the greatest harvest. Most people start the morning out dreading the hot midday and spend the even reflecting back upon it. The Poet finds beauty even in the heat, with the memory of the wonderful morning on his mind, and the anticipation of the evening to come. Why will not people look or listen or think. Why must they scan the ground close their ears & buy their philosophy in job-lots on Sundays at the hands of another.

     Tho so vastly different, an August morning or evening has all the innocence and fairy-like attributes of early spring. Early spring prompts us to worship but gives us a spirit of unrest, of desire to do some great epic deed. August gives us repose, and opportunity for the profoundest thinking.

      Are those exquisite rainbow colors in the sky the Autumnal colors in the forming to be brought down by a succession of frosts? Are they so pale & dreamy because we see them thru our dense earthy atmosphere.

     I often think what wonderful air currents must prevail among the clouds, that they are woven into such divers shapes and hap-hazard directions.

     With twilight a strong cool breeze commences to blow from the south. Is not a south wind most in keeping with that poetical sky!

     If all musical sounds were to be forever silenced – orchestras, binds, human voices, birds & insects - and I were allowed to retain one sound to cheer me, I would ask that the wind might play in the tree-tops.

The wind!  Motion is life. All is dead that stands still. Last night, afer I had gone to bed in a sort of half con­scious state my mind reviewed all that I had seen during the day.

Charles E. Burchfield, August 17, 1914