The Word-Hoard: Danae’s Shower

Danae’s shower

phrase

A rain of gold.

So this particular entry in our lexivault actually isn’t a dictionary word or phrase, but I came across it while reading a story by James Branch Cabell and it struck me as a wonderful little turn of phrase.

Danae (there should be an umlaut above the “e,” but) is a figure out of Greek myth and the mother of the famous Perseus. The story of Perseus begins with a prophesy about his grandfather, King Acrisius. The Oracle had told him that he would never have a son, but his daughter, Danae would bear one and that he would kill Acrisius. To prevent this from happening, the wicked king locked her up in a chamber (either under the palace or in a tower) and kept her sequestered there as a prisoner.

Zeus, the lecherous king of the gods, desired her, and it was said that he came to her in the form of a golden rain, which streamed into the chamber.

“Danae’s shower,” then, is a poetic way of referring to a stream of gold, or perhaps an aureate beam of light. In the example below, we see it used to describe a beautiful diffusion of yellow leaves.

This was a wonderful garden: yet nothing therein was strange. Instead, it seemed that everything hereabouts was heart-breakingly familiar and very dear to Jurgen. For he had come to a broad lawn which slanted northward to a well-remembered brook: and multitudinous maples and locust-trees stood here and there, irregularly, and were being played with very lazily by an irresolute west wind, so that foliage seemed to toss and ripple everywhere like green spray: but autumn was at hand, for the locust-trees were dropping a Danaë’s shower of small round yellow leaves. Around the garden was an unforgotten circle of blue hills. And this was a place of lucent twilight, unlit by either sun or stars, and with no shadows anywhere in the diffused faint radiancy that revealed this garden, which is not visible to any man except in the brief interval between dawn and sunrise.

– James Branch Cabell, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919)

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