Triologisms
Bringing you pithy, evocative imagery in three-legged microcosms of meaning.
I revel in having coined the term ‘triologism’ and believe this to be the only collection of these tum-tee-tum phrases in the universe.
Updated on Tuesdays … Tuesday, triologism day! You’ll never see this day of the week in the same way again.
Previously-unsoiled lintel
A horribly vengeful way to clean an allegedly soiled lintel, from Kazantzakis' lively version of Christ's life. 'Herod ... had smeared forty adolescents with tar and ignited them as torches because they pulled down the golden eagle he had fastened to the...
Stiff-necked God
This is a tough God, stiff-necked here and elsewhere mentioned in the context of 'God-trodden chaos'. A curious image, God having a stiff neck. His relationship with his people seems as harsh as the Biblical sun at noon. 'From every Jewish home the savage morning...
Stuff-pocket Zebedee
A hard-dealing merchant who makes money hand over fist. His elderly wife Salome is a more impressive character, however. 'And old stuff-pocket Zebedee filled his own jars and barrels for the year with the commission he took for use of the press.' Source: Nikos...
Spike-guarded walls
The underlying theme of Jane Eyre is her refusal to be penned in by spike-guarded walls, real or metaphorical, and her reaching for the openness outside. See also 'close-set bars' and a compelling quotation from the same book on ensnaring nets. 'I discovered, too,...
Silver-white foliage
Not the silver white of leaves but of filigree-fractals frosting a window pane, a sight rarely seen since the advent of central heating, though I remember it from my childhood, a shivering finesse of trees and leaves or tributaries fanning into estuaries. '... just as...
Hard-wrung pledge
This is a generous comment on Jane Eyre's wicked stepmother, whose husband extracts a promise from her on his death-bed, pressing her to take responsibility for his young ward. Not only does she never love the 'strange child', she nearly crushes her. Bizarrely,...
Freshly-bathed earth
The freshness after rain which Rumi uses as a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment, is here presented as a source of earth's gratitude towards rain-giving heaven. Particularly in this parched Biblical land. 'Day was breaking. The clouds had scattered; the satiated...
Desert-roughened voice
This refers to Salome (not that Salome), the upright, powerful wife of Zebedee, whose anger terrifies her son because it embodies the entire and obstinate race of Israel. Salome, elderly woman as she is, is the one with the most courage and integrity. 'Every time she...
Black-soiled Samaria
Kazantzakis' vibrant re-creation of Biblical lands and times includes earth-colour mapping of different regions. I liked the contrast of red-soiled Galilee and black-soiled Samaria. 'Leaving the red soil of Galilee behind them, they entered black-soiled Samaria.' ...
Low-gliding and pale-beaming
We are early enough in the year for the sun to still be 'low-gliding' in the sky and 'pale-beaming' in the evenings, but its arc is rising in trajectory and time. The daily occurrence and subtle shifts observed over weeks and months are both sources of charm. 'The...
Close-set bars
The undertow of Jane Eyre is the prising apart of, and escape from, close-set bars: intellectual, spiritual, emotional, social, the lot. Freedom to think, feel, speak and love. See also 'spike-guarded walls' and a compelling quotation from the same book on ensnaring...
Marrow-freezing
Jane Eyre, first as a child and later as a woman, is subjected to a number of 'marrow-freezing incidents' some of which can cause a chill of remembrance which never leaves her. Yet none manages to oppress her spirit and liveliness. 'A dream had scarcely approached my...
Widest-winged condor
This novel being set in England, I liked this evocation of a splendid bird from the other side of the world. You can see him wheeling down from an Andean eyrie in broad, confident circles, like Manley Hopkins' windhover, 'riding underneath him steady air'. '... not...
Half-blown rose
Something touching about the 'half-blown', that moment in a rose's beauty when it is heavy with the weight of its own blooming. Too early here to see any roses in the garden - instead we have glossy burnished copper-burgundy leaves unfurling thickly around the pruned...
Blossom-blanched
One bright morning, this very one in fact, I sit down at my desk to start writing a batch of triologism posts. The first one of those selected a week or two ago happens to be mirrored by the twittering of birds outside the window, on cherry trees full of budding...
Leaden-coloured sky
Having enjoyed a sunny afternoon, I am now looking out to a leaden-coloured sky, but it doesn't feel like a departing hope - rather it's bringing more of the rain that has been absent for so much of the last year, so I sense a welcome dousing. But I liked this...
Three-cornered chair
It is years - decades - since I saw one of these, but I grew up with an oak one, Jacobean-black, made by my great-grandfather and always commandeered by my ample grandfather when he visited, to the extent that my mother referred to it as 'Daddy's chair' (which didn't...
Newly-gathered snowdrop
I have tried to schedule this to coincide with the arrival of snowdrops, which the French call 'perce neige', or snow piercer. There are two references to snowdrops in Adam Bede, both alluding to the clean, bright souls of strong women, perhaps due to their upright...
Life-giving spirit
Having committed infanticide, Hetty clams up and shows no remorse, having a severely limited moral and emotional range beyond the capacity for self-pity. As Dinah pleads with her to tell the truth, Hetty says, with unusual self-knowledge, 'My heart is hard'. She faces...
Hard-won release
Arthur acts in the only way he can, using his influence to seek a stay of execution for Hetty, his one-time lover who faces the gallows after murdering the child he fathered by her. She is duly saved from hanging and her sentence is commuted to deportation. We learn...
Swift-advancing shame
Poor Hetty, her finery-flouncing superficiality has brought catastrophe upon her. The shame so swiftly advancing isn't born of conscience, but of the social hell of disapproving discovery. It isn't said, and for now it can't be seen, but she is pregnant by one man...
Life-long dreariness
Having been given a few trinkets by a feckless lover, and dreamt of being draped in more, hanging on the arm of the young Squire, Hetty now faces her trinket-free future with dismay. The humble but real pleasures of a life connected with a close community now seem...
Carpet-covered dias
Part of the infrastructure of a village fête celebrating the coming of age of the young squire, from where patronising and inappropriate prizes are bestowed on the lower orders. '... leading Mrs Irwine to a carpet-covered dais ornamented with hot-house plants...'...
Brook-watered valleys
A lovely image. Having spent childhood holidays among cousins in the countryside of Derbyshire, I remember days spent building stepping stones and bridges over the valley's brook, as well as picking some of the wild bluebells carpeting its slopes. It's when I...
Pleasure-craving nature
Even in the depths of her despair, when she learns that her handsome squire won't marry her, her focus is as much on the loss of finery - or the dream of it - as of the loss of the lover. 'The shattering of her little dream-world, the crushing blow on her new-born...
Life-long joy
One of the curious things about Hetty is that George Eliot shows her no mercy, and inspires none in us. Yet she is a limited being in everything except physical gorgeousness, and as a result, you wonder how much she can be held to account for her silliness and...
Keen-eyed man
A fine description of Adam Bede's fine eyes and keen mind. As for Hetty, nowadays she'd be branded a teaser. She has no interest in Adam and wouldn't dream of marrying him. But she enjoys his attraction to her, and reels him back in whenever he looks like slipping...
Rose-coloured ribbon
This is the moment when Hetty shifts from recollection to projection, from dwelling upon random past encounters with the smooth-handed young Squire who has turned her empty head and won her frilly, silly heart, to projecting and even engineering future encounters....
Violet-scented breath
Nowadays it would be 'mint-scented'. This sinister image, in which fate beguiles with the beauty of an afternoon, is a chill hint of what is to come. On such a day, with destiny so disguised, how could the protagonists (who don't have much nous between them), see...
Coal-scuttle bonnet
A perfect description of the late 18th century bonnet, likening it to a now defunct item. Yet as a girl spending school holidays at our cousins' farm in Derbyshire, I remember my great aunt Lena going out to the coal-shed and scooping up scuttle loads of black rocks...
Well-seasoned meerschaum
This is part of a description of the village schoolroom where the sometimes compassionate, sometimes ascerbic schoolmaster Bartle Massey tries to knock some learning, or at least letters of the alphabet, into the dunderheads of artisans and labourers who dutifully...
Liver-coloured foal
One of the most unusual descriptions of a colour I have come across, and I also liked the gawkiness of the foal. '... and beside her the liver-coloured foal with its head towards its mother's flank, apparently still much embarrassed by its own straddling existence.'...
Evil-smelling element
This refers to 'brimstone', nick-name of the former brickmaker and some time poacher who 'got' religion with the arrival of Methodism. He gave up thieving in lieu of which he studied the alphabet the better to soak up spiritual correction. But he found reading...
Apple-cheeked children
It's an obvious one, but still a charming picture of innocence and health, apple-cheeked. 'I'm sure I never saw a prettier party than this,' Arthur said, looking round at the apple-cheeked children.' Source: George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985...
Slow-striking clock
Mr Poyser is a kind farmer, and as he takes very seriously his duty to speak on behalf of the village at the coming of age of the young Squire, he is a little shy and ponderous, and has been fidgeting and fretting before the arrival of the Squire and his moment in the...
Fresh-opened blossoms and mounting larks
I like the playfulness of sharing the divine charms of a bright spring day, even while saying it's probably wasted on you. And of course, you have often forgotten yourself with straining your eyes after the mounting lark, haven't you? I did, two days ago, on a walk...
Grim-looking gown
Marvelous scene this. A village fête where prizes are doled out to the lower orders by their betters. Arthur, dashing young Squire in the making, at least has the sensitivity to ask Miss Lydia if she couldn't have provided a cheerier prize for the young Bessy. She...
Flat-boughed cedar
A favourite tree - I remember the first one I consciously noticed, said to be 1,000 years old, some of its lowest flat boughs supported by poles themselves the diameter of some trees. But perhaps the most magnificent cedar I have seen is in a park in Geneva near the...
Melancholy-looking satellite
An intriguing triologism, part of an inventively astronomical metaphor to distinguish a man's head from his much larger body, so much larger as to render the head a mere 'satellite', as the moon is to the earth. But a satellite which, at least, was not melancholy...
Gently-swelling meadow
George Eliot lived during the height of the Industrial Revolution, with several of her books being set earlier in its evolution. She gives hints and intimations of industrial smog and grind over the horizon, and the first tremors of social and economic seismic shifts....
Clear-eyed endurance
Something I admire in others but cannot pretend to have fully mastered, though am fortunate in not having been required to endure anything close to, let alone beyond, my circumscribed natural limits. Eliot isn't talking about physical pain, but her mention of opium...
Work-hardened hands
Tall, strong, upright, loving, jealous, kind, old and complex Lisbeth Bede, mother of Adam. I enjoyed George Eliot's minute description of her. '... as she stands knitting rapidly and unconsciously with her work-hardened hands, she has as firmly-upright an attitude...
Smooth-tongued palaver
Lean in, says Sheryl Sandberg. Stand up and never give in, says the farmer's wife Mrs. Poyser, even if your husband sits down to hear the slippery squire try and talk them into something that would do them no good. Mrs. Poyser, flourishing at the turn of the 19th...
Broad-leaved sycamores and weary-hearted women
George Eliot writes sensitively and movingly of the early manifestation of Methodism. She wrote Adam Bede around 1850 but set the story some fifty years earlier, and she gives an insight into its development during that half-century (apparently not a particularly...
Finely-moulded cheek
The story hangs on the breathtaking physical beauty of Hetty, whereas Dinah is generally highlighted more in terms of her kindliness and wisdom. Yet here is an early allusion to her also having a certain loveliness alongside her finely-moulded soul. '... for some of...
Gorse-built hovel
Trying to imagine a cow-shelter built of gorse. And the 'half-weaned calves' remind me of those we walk past in the nearby fields. By now they have fibre-glass igloos rather than gorse-built hovels, and they seem weaned at birth, resting on their straw piles and...
Sweet-blooded natures
A description of the Reverend Irwine, whose sisters are elsewhere described as being entirely superfluous. He is the only person who doesn't seem to think them so, due to his sweet nature. Yet, that 'epicurean' is part of a larger flabby self-indulgence, and you...
Soul-benumbing morality
Part of a half-page tirade by one character concerning the local preacher, Mr. Irwine. This novel, set in 1799, sees the rise of itinerant Methodist preachers, in this case in the form of a delicate but strong young woman, Dinah, whose vibrant sincerity and lack of...
Strangely-mingled picture
Young, strong Adam Bede is the village carpenter and cabinet-maker, hence having made a coffin which he and his brother deliver on their shoulders over a mile and a half of bucolic English scenery on a gentle summer morning. Indeed, an incongruous sight. 'It was a...
Large-hearted intelligence
I liked the linking of intelligence with large-heartedness, since heart and mind are often viewed as being in opposition, though I've always seen them as being a marriage of two kinds. When I was a student, a Mongolian teacher asked me, one mizzling Monday morning,...
Rum-sodden slumbers
How many slumbers are rum or other spirit-sodden, giving the sleeper refuge from the morning's hangover? Apologies to all sober Barbadians. '... jolting the rum-sodden slumbers of the Barbadians ...' Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern...
Time-dimmed benevolence
This makes me think of grainy photos of harmless-looking old men whom you then discover are former Nazi or other butchers tracked down and flushed out of grandfatherly retirement somewhere in Ohio or Argentina. 'A faded oleography of King Constantine and Queen Sophia,...
Far-tinkling haze
I am trying to imagine, visually and aurally, a far-tinkling haze. As a way to distance yourself from any kind of barking and jeering, this is unbeatable. The next time someone crowds my quiet, I will visualise them vanishing not in a puff of smoke, but swaddled...
Cloud-compelling Zeus
Aha, I have been importuning the wrong gods. It is Zeus who compels the clouds and gives us rain, which we need. No more rain dances, in the spring, I will resort to barbecueing various offal offerings in a Zeusly direction. '... cloud-compelling Zeus - aka The...
Tempest-haunting birds
I picture scurf-surfing cormorants and carrion birds buffeted by winds in anticipation of sailors' corpses washing up on the wind-blasted coast. And I like the straight line of continuity connecting today's mariners to those of Menelaus, contending with the same...
Sun-smitten wilderness
Few writers (Lawrence Durrell, for example) manage to convey the blinding heat and light of Greece as well as Leigh Fermor does. In this case, I loved the vivid image of the nibbling nanny goat blithely finding the tenderest leaves despite the stream of invective...
Bird-loving Chinese
Lovely poetic sound, and I wonder what prompted Leigh Fermor to describe the Chinese in such terms as I am not aware that they love birds any more than the British or others. But I like the notion all the same. 'Thanks to swarms of the far-wandering junks of the...
Tongue-tied penguins
Having seen a number of documentaries on penguins, who seem anything but tongue-tied, this is a baffling idea. They seem garrulous and permanently participating in a cocktail party. '... as the northern call fell silent among the tongue-tied penguins of the Arctic...
Petunia-coloured horn
I liked this description of an old-fashioned gramophone loud speaker, which I associate with the image of a Jack Russell sitting next to, listening to 'His Master's Voice'. However, since petunias come in a rainbow of colours, I am wondering what Leigh Fermor had in...
Night-capped Normans
Hard to think of the Normans as being 'night-capped' as in my English mind, they are more a memory of conquering invaders. But here it seems to be they who are surprised by a marauder. 'After startling the solitary Magyar herdsman with the untimely uproar and...
Nerve-stilling quietness
A luxury in short supply, this 'nerve-stilling quietness', the antidote to enervating noise pollution. Wish you as much of it as you need. '... the wide unruffled gleam of the sea below and the nerve-stilling quietness of the air.' Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani:...
Far-wandering junks
There's some historical truth in the far-wandering junks - until they decided to give it up more than a half millennium ago, the Chinese had a far-ranging navy, getting as far west as Zanzibar. It was nothing but a change to a more inward-looking policy that stopped...
Cream-coloured ponies
These ponies trot up to Orlando's front door within days of the many court cases arrayed against her over a century or so being settled in her favour. This gives her formal recognition as a living being, as opposed to a dead one, of which she had been accused,...
Spectre-pale beech
Orlando has a candid relationship with her often absent husband Bonthrop. He visits when he can, and sometimes when he's needed, which is to say when the wind doesn't allow him to persist in his endless quest to sail around a treacherous cape. Here she is overwhelmed...
Slow-falling arrow
A name tumbling from the sky like a 'slow-falling arrow', belonging to and bringing with it her husband whose visits coincide with dead calms at sea allowing him no headway in his cape-conquering quest. And always the steel-blue feather, perhaps the same that Orlando...
Dust-choked gullet
A grasshopper's whirr, trilled from his 'dust-choked gullet', being interpreted by the hearer, as the green creature builds and reinforces his straw home. Grasshoppers are one of my favourite insects and I choose to see them as augurs of happiness and positive...
Spider-thin boats
What a delicate detail, to describe these boats on the Serpentine as 'spider-thin'. It makes me think of those hair-limbed creatures which are so light they appear to walk on water. '(She stood on the banks of the Serpentine. It was a bronze colour; spider-thin boats...
Tent-shaped sides
This tent-like landscape reminds me of the Costa Rican volcano in Arenal which also looks as if a volcanic shake could make the coating of forest slide down like a crow surfing down a steel hand-rail. 'Here the landscape ... shook itself, heaped itself, let all this...
Sponge-bag trousers
As I clearly move in the wrong circles, this was a revelation to me. 'Sponge-bag trousers' is the name given, in both American and Etonian slang (I am proficient in neither), to the striped trousers worn with morning coats and similar formal daywear for gentlemen....
Dark-plumed name
The name of the man Orlando will marry is ornate and rare and fully deserving to be called 'dark-plumed': Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, 'Bonthrop' for short. Personally I prefer 'Luiz' but that's another story. Again, we see Orlando's love of fallen feathers of...
Steel-blue plumes, gleams and feathers
Orlando has a love of beautiful feathers fallen from passing birds, as do I. She seems to be particularly partial to steel-blue versions. I like here how she picks up such a feather on a walk in the wilds, and puts it in her hat, and a moment later, due to this, or...
Plaid-like juxtapositions
Orlando is a product of the 16th and 17th centuries and seems to suffer an aesthetic culture shock when confronted with the curlicued ornamentation-run-riot of the Victorian era. This is a description of an excrescence-encrusted monument where every conceivable...
Yellow-slashed sky
How many yellow-slashed dawns have I seen and yet never thought of them in these terms. The man, by the way, becomes her husband, after rescuing her from her prostrate state. When asked if she was injured, she responded memorably, 'I am dead, sir'. This is less daft...
Water-logged air
I have only once or twice experienced levels of humidity that could be described as 'water-logged air': years ago during the annual 'plum rains' in Shanghai, where the combination of heat and humidity meant you were almost as wet outside the shower as under it. Then...
Many-coloured shield
A rich description of 17th century London, this appears to refer to Westminster Abbey, with lights brightly burning inside. 'Now the Abbey windows were lit up and burnt like a heavenly, many-coloured shield (in Orlando's fancy).' Source: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A...
Snuff-coloured gown
This comes in the second half of Orlando's century-spanning adventure, that is, the female half of his-now-her life. When she returns to England after a long absence (somewhere between 20 and 200 years, you can never quite tell), she discovers a pile of court cases...
Million-candled tree
This is Sasha's description of her glittering English aristocratic lover, but she doesn't seem particularly dazzled by his brightness. He appears to be burning up even as she is cooling down, and her attraction to him has something measured and even patronising about...
Many-coloured icicles
The Muscovite Embassy includes the young woman who captures Orlando's heart. The idea of icicles being 'many-coloured' is intriguing, perhaps picking up hues flapping about in the pennants and flags of the ship. 'Among them was the ship of the Muscovite Embassy...
Wide-cheeked monster
Orlando accompanies his beloved Sasha back to the Muscovite ship, and soon loses her below deck. When searching for her, he is sure he sees her in the arms of this oafish sailor, and suffers an attack of jealousy, which continues to assail him throughout their brief...
Cast-iron sun
A surprising image, as if the sun itself were cast in Vulcan's smithy, a great sizzling shield of liquified iron. 'Everything passes; but there is no forgetting this huge, cast-iron sun shining through the evening mist, this bitter wind laden with the scent of...
An ocean of colours
Not a sight you'd expect to see on the steppes: a tulip-filled expanse. Never would I have associated this beautiful but relatively domesticated flower with a wild place of spontaneous blooming. 'And the steppe has its own riches. In spring the young tulip-filled...
Like the pigeons in St Mark’s
An unusual way to capture ever-present memories, likening them to pigeons underfoot in the Piazza San Marco, cooing and strutting in 'honey-voiced congregations'. And the quiet connection between his memories and his life is arresting. 'These memories, which are my...
Glee-singing competition
There is something a little dated about this description of someone's clothing, but I liked the 'glee-singing competition'. I had a vague idea of 'glee' as a kind of song, but looked it up to find out more: 'A glee is an English type of part song spanning the late...
Snow-bound lama
This caught my eye as it feels a little surprising as a follow on to someone's being described as a 'learned bigot' and 'ceremonious barbarian'. Perhaps a shift in sensibility which comes of living in an age where the Dalai Lama is widely known and commonly viewed as...
A noble, ancient world
A beautiful, gentle challenge to any perception of the steppe as being some sort of endless emptiness. Here we find something indeed unexpected: a landscape that can rival the brilliance of autumn woods in a quiet, soul-soothing way, and whose lakes concentrate their...
Jackal-haunted nights
Elsewhere, Ryder describes 'hag-ridden nights', the night being where dangers lurk, real or imagined. May you be spared such hag-ridden or jackal-haunted moments. 'Such a prospect perhaps as a high pinnacle of the temple afforded after hungry days in the desert and...
Tapestry-hung hall
An instant image of a hundred English great halls of Tudor or later provenance, the walls lined with a thousand hours of needlecraft. 'From the Pompeian parlour to the great tapestry-hung hall which stood unchanged, as it had been designed two hundred and fifty years...
Bun-faced man
Bland and bun-faced isn't a winning combination, even before he imposes his cricket-talk on people who don't share his enthusiasm. 'Father Phipps was in fact a bland, bun-faced man with an interest in county cricket which he obstinately believed us to share.' Source:...
Half-shaven scrimshankers
Lovely word 'scrimshank', describing either something being a mess, at sixes and sevens, or referring to work-shirking, particularly in the armed forces. The latter meaning is clearly intended here. '... those half-shaven scrimshankers I see lounging around...
Hag-ridden night
A sense of a wakeful, traumatic night, ridden by witches and haunted by demons. '... explains the distress of that hag-ridden night.' Source: Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968...
All-seeing eyes
A fictitious dedication in the novel, imbuing its artist-narrator with an almost godly omnivision, although he doesn't portray himself as being more than a financially successful society artist, painting pictures of grand aristocratic homes at a time when their owners...
Ankle-snapping boulders
Another vivid image of this lunar landscape, boulders both too big and too small to step on, instead being the perfect size to catch and break your ankles as you walk. And always, in the Mani, the 'stagnant glare' of the sun. 'At last, panting, thorn-riddled, caked...
Wave-beaten cape
A rough and remote coastal path, leading to the cave of Charon in a legend recounted by Leigh Fermor. It concerns a 'mysterious potentate' called Mavroeidis, the Black-Shaped One, who forced a 'five-times' beautiful princess to be his wife, incarcerating her in a...
Rough-hewn peninsulars
A rugged description of all-enduring peasants who survive in a brutal landscape. 'The three young fruiterers ... seemed queerly townish after the rough-hewn peninsulars.' Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, introduction by Michael...
Rock-strewn surface
Two ideas were imprinted on my mind in Leigh Fermor's description of the Mani landscape - unremitting heat and unforgiving rock. 'The Deep Mani road still hobbled on a for a few miles, the cratered and rock-strewn surface becoming more lunar in aspect with each...
Dungeon-like gloom
This gloom was no doubt accentuated by the blinding brilliance outside, and may even have been a soothing balm to the exhausted eye. You think air is clear until you see such shafts of mote-whirling light. 'Our interruption had set the dust moving and a thin golden...
Brittle-looking lorry
I imagine a clapped-out lorry with rusted, flaking panels, paint-stripped by the endless sun. And watermelons for thirsty Maniots reminds me of Thoreau's praise of watermelons as the perfectly rolling cask. 'We got a lift along it next morning in a brittle-looking...
Wild-looking grass
One of the landscape changes of recent years is the steady return of wild-looking grass where previously there were endless, weedless swards of emerald green lawn. The more varied it is, the more I wonder how many insects and small creatures live there relatively...
Silver-plated water
I have seen beaten-bronze and copper-coloured water, but never silver-plated. 'The cool, placid, silver-plated water at even coolly awaits the frost.' 16 Oct 1859 Source: Henry David Thoreau, The Journal 1837-1861, Damion Searls (ed.), preface by John R. Stilgoe (New...
Craven-hearted neighbours
This refers to Thoreau's outrage at the callous reaction of his neighbours to the death of John Brown on the grounds that he 'threw his life away! - what way would they have thrown their lives, pray?' 'It galls me to listen to the remarks of craven-hearted neighbors...
Finger-cold evening
A great way to convey a chill in the air cold enough to affect the extremities. Also like the idea of improving an evening by pulling up turnips. 'Another finger-cold evening, which I improve in pulling up turnips.' 21 Nov 1860 Source: Henry David Thoreau, The...
Glaucous-green field
I found myself wondering just what shade of green is glaucous, and learning that it is either 'a dull greyish-green or blue', or a 'pale greyish or bluish' and also refers to being covered in a powdery bloom as on grapes. A fine alliterative colour combination, in...
Slate-colored snowbirds
Firstly, I like the idea of a 'snow' bird being the colour of slate. And being obsessed with colours and the names we give them, I notice how many hues and shades can only be described in reference to something of that colour. Elsewhere Thoreau describes slate as...
Pepper-pot turrets
The description of these towers and turrets in the village of Kardamyli, which are a match for the mine's-bigger-than-yours competition of medieval San Gimignano lords, is extraordinary. Leigh Fermor was housed and cared for in one of them, with meals and fresh...
Rose-coloured rain
This refers to a dreamed of rain of rose-coloured petals, part of an extravagant historical fantasy Leigh Fermor indulges, imagining a rough fishermen being recognised as a lost Byzantine emperor. 'Each carpeted step seemed to carry us into a denser rose-coloured rain...
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Interesting! Your triologisms remind me of the two-word kennings in Beowulf.