Look closely at the edges of the darkest clouds and you will see something interesting. You will see a rim of light as the sun tries to force its way through the murkiness. It almost looks like a rim of silver.
This observation might have inspired John Milton to write these words in his 1634 masque, “Comus: A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634”:
I see ye visibly, and now believe
That he, the Supreme Good, to whom all things ill
Are but as slavish officers of vengeance,
Would send a glistering guardian, if need were
To keep my life and honor unassailed.
Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
I did not err; there does a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
And casts a gleam over this tufted grove.
Milton coined the phrase silver lining. It would be expanded to the idiom, “There is a silver lining in every cloud” in the 19th century.
In 1840, one Katty Macane wrote a review of a novel titled “Marian: Or, A Young Maid’s Fortunes” by a Mrs. S. Hall in “The Dublin Magazine”. The review contained this sentence: “…there’s a silver lining to every cloud that sails about the heavens if we could only see it.”
Since those days, the phrase has come to represent something positive and hopeful – that one can always find a positive aspect in the worst circumstances.
Can one really find something positive in life’s tumultuous and frustrating instances? Can a path be found amidst the ruins of tragedy? Can one really find a song when the heart is in pieces like glass that fell in a storm?
Even with my hardened and faithless heart, I have to agree that every dark cloud really has a silver lining.
However, must we necessarily experience dark clouds before we can enjoy silver linings?
Why?
Sometimes I think there are two men out there – two old and cantankerous men. It has to be men – we are mean like that. Men like Randolph and Mortimer Duke from the 1983 movie, “Trading Places”. Two old farts who find joy in turning our lives upside down and then betting with each other on whether us poor mortals down here can see the silver lining that hovers at the edges of the dark clouds that they placed in our lives in the first place. I bet they don’t even bet much at all on their experiments. And as they sit up there pulling the strings and laughing their tails off, we strut around this stage trying so hard to make sense out of this thing called life. I wonder which of them bets on the fact that we will see the silver lining and move on to the next act and the next iteration of dark clouds. I bet he is the one who whispered these words to John Milton:
“…there does a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
And casts a gleam over this tufted grove”
I bet he did.
For my part, one of these days, when the sun sets into the recesses of the oceans that are rising faster than the fears that grip our world…one of these days, I might write about all those times I saw the silver linings that adorned those dark clouds that turned my days murky and my nights darker than Hades.