“Eclipses be – predicted – / And Science bows them in –” wrote the poet Emily Dickinson. As last Wednesday’s solar eclipse was bowed in across my news apps, those lines resonated with me. Dickinson’s masterly use of dashes to suspend the word “predicted” mirrored my experience of the Met Office’s forecast, which kept me teetering between hope and dismay all day and for days before.
Ahead of the appointed time, we had scouted the hills for a commanding view of the western horizon, and to get a sense of it on an ordinary sunlit evening. There were swallows skimming over the stubble grass and rooks clamouring in the trees. At that stage, the few people I encountered were unaware that a deep partial eclipse was even going to happen.
But predicted events – as a dash might suggest – can surprise us. When we got to the field on Wednesday evening, the sun was merely glancing through the clouds. Yet people kept arriving. Solitary figures. Couples. Parents with children. Herds of teenagers. Elderly ladies. They brought colanders and cardboard boxes as makeshift pinhole cameras. They spread blankets and garments or simply sat straight down on the grass. They lifted mobile phones and donned solar-eclipse glasses.
As we all faced the lowering sun, together we made a scattered amphitheatre of uptilted faces staring, like our ancestors, into mysterious vastness. There were blurry glimpses of a crescent sun. But our eclipse was mostly a dulling of light and a chilling of breeze. Then a falling quiet. Then a dusk-dark.
Eventually it brightened and warmed again; rooks cawed. Two teenage girls danced silently to their propped-up phones as if to shrug off any remnant moon-shadow. People began to drift away, and a child, already focused on the next thing, rushed to give her parents sprigs of white clover. A man joked in passing: “Where can you apply for a refund?” I laughed but, to my surprise, I realised that I wouldn’t trade my experience. I may not have seen much of the eclipse. But I’d felt all of it.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com
