/lit/ - Literature

>Post some good lines or verses about light.

>If you know great metaphors that try to define light then it's even better.

When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
(Book of Job)

I found the words to every thought
I ever had – but One –
And that – defies me –
As a Hand did try to chalk the Sun

To Races – nurtured in the Dark –
How would your own – begin?
Can Blaze be shown in Cochineal –
Or Noon – in Mazarin?
(Emily Dickinson)

I am light; oh that I were night! But this is my loneliness, that I am girded by light.
Oh that I were dark and nocturnal! How I would suck at the breasts of light!
And even you I would bless, you little twinkling stars and glowworms up there! – And be blissful for your gift of light.
But I live in my own light, I drink back into myself the flames that break out of me.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Chapter III)

Twas a light that made
Darkness itself appear
A thing of comfort.
(Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama)

De Sanctis, a very acute reader, immediately realizes that in the Paradiso Dante speaks of ineffable things, of a spiritual realm, and wonders how the realm of the spirit "can be represented." Consequently, he says, in order to make the Paradiso artistic Dante has imagined a human paradise, one that is accessible to the senses and the imagination. That is why he tries to find in light the link with our human potential for comprehension. And here De Sanctis becomes an enthusiastic reader of this poetry where there are no qualitative differences, only changes in luminous intensity, and he cites "the throngs of splendours" (Par. 23.82), the clouds "like diamonds whereon the sun did strike" (Par. 2.33), the blessed appearing "like a swarm of bees delving into flowers" (Par. 31.7), "rivers from which living flames leap out, lights in the shape of a river that glows tawny with brightness" (Par. 30.61–64), the blessed disappearing "like something heavy into deep water" (Par. 3.123).
(Umberto Eco on the Paradiso