Soe many washings still the specks remaine

Landscape with a double rainbow (1812) John Constable

   The skies give succour or they withhold it; and whatever their whim, for the countryman the eternal promise is still vivid in the soft rainbow that spans the fields. For the rainbow over the battered ark, like Adam's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, is one of the several Bible stories that come very near the heart of things for him. He it is who still actually bears the burden of Adam's fall from grace, and for him the rainbow is still knit with the hues of god's mercy.
   I remember coming upon a memorial tablet in a Fenland church commemorating the floods that had devastated the district in the years 1613, 1614, and again in 1670. Surely, complained the author of the quaint rhyme:

'Surely our sins were tinctured in grainne.
May we not say the labour was in vaine,
Soe many washings still the specks remaine.'

In teh face of such continued punishment out of the relentless skies the rainbow itself seemed little better than mockery. But not for long. The countryman know better than that.

'Heavens face is clear, though the Bowe appeare
Reader nere fear: there is no arrow neare.'

from Miles from Anywhere (1944) by C. Henry Warren