Fata Morgana

created by Webster 1913

(thing) by liha (5.3 mon) (print) ? (I like it!) 1 C! Sun Oct 22 2000 at 21:35:07

According to legend, Fata Morgana (Italian for fairy Morgan) was the half-sister of King Arthur. Morgan, who was said to live in a crystal palace beneath the water, had magical powers that could build fantastic castles out of thin air. Looking across the Straits of Messina (between Italy and Sicily), residents of Reggio, Italy, on occasion would see buildngs, castles, and sometimes whole cities appear, only to vanish again in minutes.

The Fata Morgana is a mirage that tranforms a fairly uniform horizon into one which rises vertically above the horizon. This mirage occurs where the air temperature increases with elevation above the surface. Thus, mirages like the Fata Morgana are often seen where warm air rests above a cold surface such as large bodies of water and polar regions.

Source: Essentials of Meteorology by C. Donald Ahrens

(idea) by Lometa (1.6 d) (print) ? (I like it!) Wed Jun 06 2001 at 22:39:48

Fata Morgana

O SWEET illusions of song

That tempt me everywhere,
In the lonely fields, and the throng

Of the crowded thoroughfare!

I approach and ye vanish away,

I grasp you, and ye are gone;
But ever by night and by day,

The melody soundeth on.

As the weary traveller sees

In desert or prairie vast,
Blue lakes, overhung with trees

That a pleasant shadow cast;

Fair towns with turrets high,

And shining roofs of gold,
That vanish as he draws nigh,

Like mists together rolled --

So I wander and wander along,

And forever before me gleams
The shining city of song,

In the beautiful land of dreams.

But when I would enter the gate

Of that golden atmosphere,
It is gone, and I wonder and wait

For the vision to reappear.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Probably the best thing about endeavoring to learn about poetry and poems for myself is that I can choose what catches my interests as opposed to having it forced upon me as it often is in school.This poem is from Birds of Passage, Flight the Third (1873). Longfellow was recognized in his lifetime and I think a new work by him was looked forward to. Bob Blair from The Poet's corner, an ardent admirer writes:

Part of the Longfellow caricature is of a poet self-consciously poetic (and) Longfellow's Fata Morgana has a lot of archaic conventions in it, but at heart it is a plain complaint about the impossibility of achieving perfection.

Not only is Fata Mogana known as the legendary sister of King Authur but it's also a term used by Sicilians as the name of a mirage that manifests during certain seasons off the Calabrian coast.

Sources:

Part of the Longfellow caricature is of a poet self-consciously ...:
http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/010227f.htm

Public domain text taken from The Poets' Corner:
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/longf03.html#8

CST Approved

(thing) by Nordicfrost (2.9 y) (print) ? (I like it!) Fri Feb 08 2002 at 14:23:03

A recurring short skit series in the hilarious Norwegian TV-program �pen Post. Actors Harald Eia and Classe Ekman play two anti-media zealots, with their own airtime. Since the participants of Fata Morgana are the only ones not aware of the irony of bringing hardcore anti-TV messages out on TV, they try as hard as they can to disrupt the program with their messages. Sadly for Fata Morgana, they like to be on TV, even though they are supposed to hate it. Each time they discover things like having groupies, free soda in the studio and other small pleasures.
The also try to get the message out by dancing like robots at the end of each skit while singing "We're dancing like robots". Weird.

Sample skit:
Harald Eia: Awww, look at the small puppy (holds a plush puppy), think of puppies and a sommer day. Think of your girlfriend walking through a meadow...
Classe Ekman: HIROSHIMA!!! NAGASAKI!!! GEORGE BUSH!!! (Pictures of atom explosions flash on the screen.)
Harald Eia: That was an example of the duality of media.

(definition) by Webster 1913 (print) Tue Dec 21 1999 at 23:36:45

Fa"ta Mor*ga"na (?). [It.; -- so called because this phenomenon was looked upon as the work of a fairy (It. fata) of the name of Morgána. See Fairy.]

A kind of mirage by which distant objects appear inverted, distorted, displaced, or multiplied. It is noticed particularly at the Straits of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily.

printable version
chaos

The real problem of Israel	Elgin marbles	babel fish	June Night
Mirage	Strait of Magellan	Morgan Le Fey	Meteorology
Why oil on water looks like a rainbow	Greenland	timing belt	fairy
Dream Log: February 21, 2000	William Kotzwinkle	Calabria	Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Straits of Messina	The Wild Swans: Part 2	Polar	King Arthur
1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake	jamais vu	Unusual natural phenomena	Sundog

Y'know, if you log in, you can write something here, or contact authors directly on the site. Create a New User if you don't already have an account.

Login
Password

remember me
password reminder
register

Everything2 Help

Look at this mess the Death Borg made!
The year of Chilean sea bass is officially over
Love Canal
Stockwell Day
couch fishing
Human Genome Project
Jack Russell Terrier
Germany
deliciously oily
Tortoise
Getting an STI test
Andromeda
New York subway
Living and dealing with depression

Meezzio
Gotlandssnus	(thing)
argv
Astral Plane	(idea)
Madara
One Winged Angel	(fiction)
Tom Rook
Talk is cheap	(poetry)
shaogo
Adelle Davis	(person)
Aerobe
race car g sfjsgsd	(poetry)
Binah
Dream Log: July 5, 2008	(dream)
StrawberryFrog
Forgotten things in space	(idea)
antigravpussy
velvet revolution fairy tale	(idea)
Heitah
Nerve agent VX	(thing)
Pavlovna
shite	(idea)
wonton
Days and nights come together in a slow falling down	(fiction)
Pavlovna
wee	(idea)
katherine
root log: July 2008	(log)
Madara
There�s nothing like a trail of blood to find your way back home	(fiction)

Everything 2 is brought to you by the letter C and The Everything Development Company