"Loud roared the dreadful thunder, The rain a deluge showers"
About this Quote
Cherry opens with weather as spectacle, but the line is really about command: an actor-manager’s instinct for grabbing a house by the collar. “Loud roared” is aggressively sensory, almost comic in its overkill, a little like stage directions disguised as poetry. Thunder doesn’t just sound; it “roars,” given an animal throat to match the melodrama audiences came for. “Dreadful” is less a nuanced emotion than a cue: feel fear now. The phrase is blunt on purpose, built to travel across a noisy Georgian theatre where subtlety dies in the back row.
Then comes the second punch: “The rain a deluge showers.” Cherry stacks synonyms (rain/deluge/showers) to inflate the storm until it becomes biblical. That excess is the point. It’s the language of catastrophe scaled for entertainment, turning weather into a moral atmosphere: nature itself is in revolt, so whatever human plot follows must be high-stakes, probably punitive. The subtext is classical melodramatic hygiene: emotional turmoil needs an external equivalent, and nothing does it faster than a sky falling apart.
Context matters here because Cherry wrote for the stage at a moment when theatre was competing with its own emerging technologies of sensation: thunder sheets, rain effects, the whole machinery of “astonishment.” These lines read like an invitation to the crew as much as to the audience. They don’t merely describe a storm; they authorize one, giving permission for noise, for excess, for feelings big enough to justify the ticket price.
Then comes the second punch: “The rain a deluge showers.” Cherry stacks synonyms (rain/deluge/showers) to inflate the storm until it becomes biblical. That excess is the point. It’s the language of catastrophe scaled for entertainment, turning weather into a moral atmosphere: nature itself is in revolt, so whatever human plot follows must be high-stakes, probably punitive. The subtext is classical melodramatic hygiene: emotional turmoil needs an external equivalent, and nothing does it faster than a sky falling apart.
Context matters here because Cherry wrote for the stage at a moment when theatre was competing with its own emerging technologies of sensation: thunder sheets, rain effects, the whole machinery of “astonishment.” These lines read like an invitation to the crew as much as to the audience. They don’t merely describe a storm; they authorize one, giving permission for noise, for excess, for feelings big enough to justify the ticket price.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
|---|
More Quotes by Andrew
Add to List
