Poetry: Grey: Gen

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Title: Grey
Length: 500
Rating: Gen
Notes: Colour poem (a variation on)
Summary: 50 shades of Victorian grey
Author's Notes: I found 50+ instances of the colour grey in canon. Very startling for me: I've never met anyone with grey coloured eyes so I always attributed grey eyes as something special and, in my mind, specifically linked to Sherlock Holmes, but when you do a 'Find' search of canon, you realise EVERYONE has grey eyes. It's very, very strange (and thus, perhaps, fitting for the month's prompt as it was poet who had the revelation). I mean, Victorian London must have been populated by nothing but grey eyed people! Anyway, this poem started out as one thing and became something else. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy.


Fifty shades…

a bouquet of grey irises: keen, like the quicksilver gleam of a master blackmailer; shifting, like odiousness crafted, framed by white lashes; empty, like the vacancy of the overwrought and hearth-rug-strewn; shrewd, like set-companions for the granite face, iron nerves, and leathery conscience of the successful man of affairs; watery, like the peculiar, far-off introspection of the first-borne.

a grey light: uncertain, like a tinge cast through a solitary window; shimmering, like a copper beech bathed in midnight’s glow; swirling, like the mist of the only highly improbable; polished like the coffee-pot of omniscience; bright, like the moon on the Tor; foreboding, like the dawn of long-shouldered reckoning or a significance of almost-too-late; inevitable, mayhap, if one’s spectacles are tinted.

a wearisome grey metropolis: stone-hard, like the pavement of London-town, dusty, like its streets, dead, like its winter evening’s gloom, slate, like its wind-yielding, brick-wielding roofs; prosaic, so unlike the wispy heather-tuft curve, the gleaming half-shadow companion, of the moor; low, commonplace, so unlike the ancient clay of a Tudor chimney, rising high, crumbling singularly, keeping silent vigil over bucolic wickedness.

a grey rhythm: jaunty, like the dappled double-time clip-clop of unmistakable hooves afore aniseeded wheels; brazen, like the splendid clop-clip of a pair of high-steppers in the shafts of an old yellow barouche; swift, like a Blaze of horseflesh.

a grey cry:  tinkly, like a pane broken by crack-shot aim; jingly, like coins dropped for pity, for work, for play, for ruse, for greed.

a grey noise:  plinking, like the glug of pond-soaked loot, dripping; splashing, like Rapunzel tresses dashed where they lay; quiet, like the press of a note’s blotting, silent, like a treaty unfurled, scratching, like a cypher of revenge.

a drop of grey bitters on the tongue: ashen, like a tell-tale Trichinopoly; pearly, like the chaulk means-end of a point dissolved in milk.

a taste of grey smoke:  burnt, like a coil set to roust a crouching evil; subtle, like the perfumed exhale of a dove suspended in air.

a touch of a grey pair of trousers: baggy, like the shepherd’s check of a ginger fool; coarse, like the Harris tweed of a phantom angel; soft, like the swagger of flannel beneath a Panama.

a lady’s grey: worn, like a typewritist’s glove; smooth, like a tidy little handbag of crocodile skin; coldly comforting, like old Spanish pendant within reach; silky, like a dress, trimmed with ostrich feathers; sombre, like a dress, untrimmed, unbraided, yet unmatched in memory; portentous, like a shock of grey in the dark near-doom of a step-daughter.

a grey Sherlock Holmes: warm, like a long cloak that shields ‘gainst journey’s soot; icy, like veins frozen to bursting by anger’s sudden winter storm; supple, like the plumes of a lank bird at study; variable, like austere clouds parting to reveal a fundament of twinkling amusement; quick, like darting questioning glances in every direction; sharp, like rapiers; mouse, like the embrace of an old familiar dressing gown.

…of Victorian grey.

Comments

[thesmallhobbit.livejournal.com]

Guess what colour my eyes are!

This is a lovely poem - you've captured so much here, and conveyed a real feel of the Holmesian universe.

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Hahaha! I guess I have met someone. So it must be true! An island full of grey eyed people.

Thank you! It was an interesting exercise, but not the love poem I imagined.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

This is such an inspired idea and so beautifully done. ACD really did use grey in so many ways - once again you've made me look anew at the canon.

Just a few favourite lines:

polished like the coffee-pot of omniscience

inevitable, mayhap, if one’s spectacles are tinted.

a grey noise: ...quiet, like the press of a note’s blotting,

subtle, like the perfumed exhale of a dove suspended in air.

coarse, like the Harris tweed of a phantom angel

sombre, like a dress, untrimmed, unbraided, yet unmatched in memory

mouse, like the embrace of an old familiar dressing gown.


And your poem has rather sent me off on an investigation of eye colours in the canon, and on an investigation of how common different eye colours are in the UK ^___^ I was somewhat surprised to find that it's blue eyes that are apparently presently most common in Britain - I would have assumed it was brown.

Doing a brief bit of searching through the canon, it seems that ACD is keen on grey/gray eyes, blue eyes and dark eyes ('brown' seems to be explicitly used only three times). I wonder if anyone has ever done an essay on eye colour in canon... It's so, so interesting that you've brought up how common grey eyes are in the stories - I had just never noticed. I might be getting this wrong, but I do dimly recall the idea that William Gillette had grey eyes, ACD was influenced by this and so eventually gave Holmes grey eyes too. But just taking a quick look at when the various stories were written, it looks like ACD was writing characters as grey-eyed long before Gillette's play - he just expanded that partiality to include Holmes. (Oh, and I've just seen that ACD described Dr. Joseph Bell as having 'penetrating grey eyes'...)

And my mother had grey eyes! ^__^ My father and my siblings had/have dark brown eyes but I think there's just a touch of influence from my mother's eyes in mine. They're brown but sort of flirting with hazel - medium brown in the centre but going into a murky green further out.

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I did like the coffee pot of omniscience and if life allows, I shall return to my idea of a noir story with Barker and Mrs. Amberley for Valentine's Day. And I learned more about men's patterns in trousers than I ever needed to know.

It was astounding before Hobbit above, I'd never met anyone. It seemed like a literary device because only people in books actually had grey eyes. My eyes are blue, so were my father's but everyone else I've ever known (or produced!) has brown eyes. And most of the male important figures (Mycroft, Moriarty, Douglas of Wisteria Lodge, Jonas Oldacre, Milverton, the guy from the Priory School, the Thor Bridge guy, etc. have grey eyes. Once you start pulling it up, you see the pattern at once. Maybe Bell, maybe Gillette, I don't know, maybe it's like the Violets and the Jameses.

[debriswoman]

Waited till I had time to read this properly. This is nailed beautifully and thoroughly. So many references and apt phrases...wind yielding and brick wielding caught my eye in particular.

So very well done, ma’am:-)

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Thank you, thank you! I like that one, too!

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

This is amazing work. You have a gift for the use of language.

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Thank you, thank you!