A Love Note to Lavender—in Three Photographs
“The violet hour”—that lovely phrase and lovelier descriptive observation comes from an unlikely source—T.S.Eliot’s poem the “Wasteland.”
As the poem’s title suggests, the “Wasteland,” written in the wake of WWII, is about decay—cultural, moral, and spiritual. And yet, in the midst of that waste, Eliot finds a phrase—“the violet hour”—to describe that moment just before twilight when the sky changes from blue to reddish blue.
That delicate tint hangs on the evening air for just a moment, before the hour grows dark, the blue-black in which the stars begin to crystallize.
But while I’ve always loved Eliot’s “violet hour” as a poetical phrase, I did not know the truth and beauty of his descriptive observation until the other day, when I looked up at the sky and saw this—
The violet hour. With a lavender wash where the light of the afterglow is still diffuse. What added to the gorgeous wonder of the moment was the faint smile of a Cheshire moon appearing in the gloaming and the jewel of a planet, glimmering just to the left above it.
Where I live, there are no violets, but we do have a flower of lovely lavender hue, that is indigenous to the islands, growing along the seashore. It is called the beach virtex, or pōhinahina.
The sky is never the same sky twice. So we walk through a gallery of days in which the rooms are hours, and the display, once taken down, is not shown twice.
But the other night I saw this sky, which captured in a single frame all the most gorgeous colors of the sunset—blue, violet, lavender, orange, white brown.
It made me think of the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko and his floating color fields.
It is a privilege to have watched the painter of light make this canvas for a single viewing on that night, never to be shown, at any other time or any other place in the world.
It is the art that is the truest art of seeing—what is here, what is now, and that once gone will never be repeated.
I makes me wonder what I miss, not looking up.