I mentioned earlier that I’m auditing an English class at Harvard taught by literary critic James Wood. We’ve so far muscled our way through Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, V. S. Naipaul, and Henry Green. Now we are reading Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. It’s an inspiring read in all sorts of ways, but one thing I noticed right away was the Irish-Turk-sort-of-American writer’s use of metaphors.

Take this description, right at the beginning of the book, written in the voice of the Dutch narrator: “It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows case by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe, yearn even for those days when you play cricket wearing two sweaters under a cold sky patched here and there by a blue tatter—enough to make a sailor’s pants, as my mother used to say.”

The sky is one of the hardest things to describe in a fresh way. Think of all those “rosy-fingered dawns” and “skies red enough to delight a sailor.”  Yet so many scenes must include a description of the sky! Here are some others that have impressed me:

“More than half the short winter’s day had passed while they were in the warehouse. The sky was a blue so pale that it was almost no color; wooded bluffs loomed above them, beyond the industrial estate, marking the edge of the city. The sun had dropped behind the bluffs already, so that the tops of the bare trees showed up finely spiky, like hair or fur, against a yellow flow of light from somewhere out of sight. While they waited, their breath began to fog up the car windows.” (From the short story “Friendly Fire,” by Tessa Hadley in The New Yorker, Feb. 4, 2008)

“Overhead, the sky is the color of a peacock’s breast, shimmery, nearly metallic blue. Towards the east, the drape of night is beginning to close over us, highlighting the days’ lingering colors. The blue overhead fades westward into a dramatic periwinkle, which in turn gives way to an intense lavender dissolving into a brilliant fuchsia horizon. A few hundred yards in the distance, the great fountain, already lit by yellow lights, glows, the enormous ancient plane tress that line the Cours Mirabeau, in their stark winter nakedness just two days ago, are covered now with tiny buds, like stars in the fading light.” (From “The Provençal Sky,” by Michele Anna Jordan in Travelers’ Tales Provence.)

“In the early evening, high-altitude clouds in the western sky formed a thin yellow wash which became richer over the hour, and then thickened until a filtered orange glow hung above the giant crests of parkland trees; the leaves became nutty brown, the branches glimpsed among the foliage oily black, and the desiccated grasses tool on the colors of the sky. A Fauvist dedicated to improbable color might have imagined a landscape this way, especially once sky and ground took on a reddish bloom and the swollen trunks of elderly oaks became so black they began to look blue.” (From the opening of Chapter Eight in Atonement, by Ian McEwan, published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.)

Three of these four examples are from fiction, but I’d be willing to bet that the authors spent a lot of time looking at real skies and a lot of time figuring out how to put the images into words. Nonfiction writers can do the same attentive looking and the same imaginative reckoning.

Do you have a favorite? Add it here.