Since I had no idea what sillion is Jill

[jill stockinger]

Perhaps Curt has heard of sillion before. I had not. This is what I learned, when I searched for a definition:

sillion

sillion (English)

Origin & history

Revived by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his 1877 poem The Windhover ; ultimately related to French sillon ("furrow").

Pronunciation

• (Brit. Eng.) IPA: /ˈsɪlɪən/

Hyphenation

sil·li·on

Noun

sillion 

1. (rare) The thick, voluminous, and shiny soil turned over by a plow.
• 1877, Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Windhover, published 1918, verse 3,
   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
  Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
• 1951, Hazelton Spencer, British Literature, Heath, page 827,
  The hard, plodding work of plowing (of the priest) makes the plowshare shine as it goes down the row turning up the sillion.
• 1968, Wendell Stacy Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Poet As Victorian, Cornell University Press, page 87,
  The freely flying windhover, after all, has something essential in common with the sillion of a plowed field and the broken embers of a…
• 2006, Mark DeLong, Inetogether, Lulu.com, ISBN 141169175X, page 4,
  My tiller cut easily in the moist ground, and the weeds of winter and early spring easily yielded to the tines. Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote that there is “no wonder” that “sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine” — but the fact is, Mr. Hopkins, that there is in spring great wonder in the glimmer of “sillion” falling off the plough. And that wonder takes the “sheer plod” from my feet.
  That is quite the reverse for the gardener who churns under his failed crops in August. In dust, there is no sillion, and that work in hot summer sun is the sheerest of plod.
• Presented at the Seminar on Indian and ...: "... by ploughing one's inner self, so that the sillion shines. ..." Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague.

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This is an uncountable noun. 

An uncountable noun is not used with "a" or "an" and cannot be made plural: Words like "electricity," "blood," and "happiness" are uncountable. 

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Cite this page:
"sillion" – WordSense Online Dictionary (8th July, 2023) URL: https://www.wordsense.eu/sillion/

[Nedra Crowe-Evers]

I wrote some papers about Hopkins while working towards my Master's degree at CSUS. He was--is--one of my favorite poets. But he had a habit of changing words ever so slightly to keep the rhythm in his poems or introduce a sense of the archaic or enhance a rhyme. We see this in The Windhover with sillion and vermillion.

Good research, Jill

Nedra

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[Helen Cooper]

We learn something new every day!  Thanks, Jill.

Helen

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