The Wind Is With Us

Poul Anderson has taught me at least to notice the wind as an active force in literature and fiction. Here it is again in works by two other authors:

"The wind howled and shrieked and was trying to tell us something, like wild music that would destroy your brain."

-Virginia Andrews, If There Be Thorns (London, 1993), p. 313.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

-copied from here.

The wind howls in Andrews and Wordsworth.

Poul Anderson teaches us to value myths, not to dismiss them as "creeds outworn."