What Is The Origin Of Whisper In The Wind In Literature?

Question

Early examples of this poetic phrase? Love this atmospheric trope in novels, wondering when authors first used wind as a secret messenger.

siskaayu · Answer

The concept ‘whisper in the wind’ is often used in poetry and refers to the wind being a messenger for secrets, ghosts or even nature itself. As a metaphor for something that is ephemeral, haunting or just barely there, ‘whispers beneath the moon’ uses the concept of whispers and hidden messages in order to build a certain atmosphere in the story. The main character of the story decodes supernatural whispers he hears on night time, turning an old poetic concept into the solution for the strange occurrences that are happening in the town.

Scarlett · Answer

It’s a beautiful, democratic word – villages, emperors and even eccentric sailors of the coast have used it to tell stories of life and of adventure. I hunted down ancient poems and folk songs to read how the wind had been used as a carrier of souls or to announce change. The wind, in many of the world’s indigenous cultures is even viewed as a messenger or relative – often giving voice to their spiritual knowledge.

This modern phrase is of Romantic origin and has since been developed in literature, song and novels. A popular line from many folk songs for instance will have the wind carry away the speaker’s secrets, their questions or even their grief. It is a phrase that has entered common usage through such repeated exposure in literature and song, of the wind’s ability to be everywhere at once yet be nowhere.

This motif of a whispering wind is something that I occasionally point out to friends when they read. It is a way of evoking a host of feelings and associations – of loss and hope and warning – without ever stating them out loud. It is a very versatile and powerful motif. It keeps popping up in all sorts of writing.

Hazel · Answer

My take on the wind-as-whisper motif is that it’s a set of mythic and folkloric tools that writers have at their disposal. They allow the writer to conjure up the sort of mysterious, unseen carrier of news or of the loved-dead that they need. And that sort of thing has been around for a long time – in ancient cultures, for example, the winds were often given names and were embodied in myth and religious experience – so it’s a really old theological concept. Vayu, the Hindu god of the wind, for example, is still worshiped today in some parts of the Indian subcontinent. Aeolus, the Greek god of the same name, featured in The Odyssey.

Reading on, I notice the motif is often used in 3 ways: as a messenger (to carry news, to carry a voice of loved ones), as a harbinger (to signal change, good or bad), and as a memory holder (to bring back whispers from past times). Today’s writers and songwriters remix these uses of the motif. Most of the time the wind sounds strangely comforting but at times quite menacing. Now, I just wonder why the wind is whispering in a particular scene. What need is this fulfilling? What is the author leaving to our imagination, and that is half the fun of close reading!

Quincy · Answer

I must have read this a couple of years ago, because it’s been lingering in the back of my mind ever since I read it in a collection of lyric poems. It’s an old trick that writers use to convey words that they don’t wish to write down. In myths of old, there were wind people: spirits of the wind. Today, poets often use the wind as a postman, in order to deliver private messages. This is also how many modern songs use the phrase of a wind carrying voices of the past.

This is another very attractive figure. The phrase allows a scene to breathe as it conveys the rumor, memory or ghostly hint of a sound carried by a whispering wind. It is a simple yet powerful device that is used in lots of stories that I read and films that I watch.

Una · Answer

That image of someone or something ‘whispering on the wind’ is everywhere. It’s a very old and almost inevitable motif. The winds are the easiest invisible thing for stories to use as messengers, omens and even as memory carriers. In Greek mythology the winds are personified and given human form, and in Homer’s stories about heroes such as Odysseus control of the winds can be a matter of life and death.

This very practical use of wind as a story element to convey secret words, lovers' sighs and omens and prophecies has, over the centuries, become symbolic. In medieval and classical poetry the breeze is often used to convey secret messages and, in Romantic poetry, it conveys the imponderable workings of nature to reflect human emotions. The use of the wind as imagery in non-Western stories also conveys a similar message of human emotion and news of the uncanny.

This familiar English idiom is more a crystallisation of a multitude of connotations to do with nature, voice and the unseen than an original invention. The expression ‘whisper in the wind’ has always seemed to me both intimate and endless, like a running story or rumor that has always existed and will go on to mutate and evolve endlessly.

Cassidy · Answer

I listen to the trees on weekend mornings. And I reflect on the numerous occasions where I saw the winds of change move emotions instead of actions. Be it in the fantasy or the more lyrical prose of this genre, the wind has often been used by J.R.R. Tolkien in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ as well as by many other writers after him to transport all sorts of things: memories, warnings, secret paths.

Furthermore, there are many variations in cultural specific contexts in which the winds are used to express feelings of seasonal change or to send messages to absent lovers. The Western ballads might contain an omen or a message lost on the winds. Motif endurance is motivated by this flexibilty, and so my one little piece of advice to writers would be to use the whispering wind sparingly–for it is truly gorgeously haunting when it is earned.

phy pai · Answer

The endurance of this phrase may have a lot to do with its tangibility. It is something that one can feel. If one were to go outside on a windy day and close one’s eyes, one could probably begin to hear the whispering mentioned in the phrase. This is not to say that the phrase refers to some abstract idea that has been expressed literarily. Rather, literature attempts to identify the experience that this phrase names and to render it in words. As such, the best literary phrases are those that give expression to a felt experience which had not prior to that been given words. Thus, the origin of the phrase is not a library. It is a field, a hill, a sea shore. The writers listed above are merely so many stenographers, each one of them attempting to render that moment of universal listening. But what they render is a tool by which to describe a real and profound feeling that is first encountered in nature.

Marion Morris · Answer

For another example, let’s consider music. In the last 50 years or so, song lyrics have done more to keep this phrase in the popular consciousness than all novels combined. As I noted in an earlier post, we find this phrase in a wide array of musical genres: folk ballads, power metal songs, New Age music. The phrase has probably reached more people recently through songs like these than through reading words written by Keats or Shelley themselves. And, whereas those authors’ words were ‘whispered’ to readers in books, today the musical versions carry the phrase to audiences everywhere. In each of these genres the phrase conveys different emotions: melancholy in country songs, mystery in hard rock, freedom in New Age music. Thus today the phrase is interpreted largely by the media of popular culture, rather than by literature itself. Trying to follow the purely literary origins of this phrase would be to ignore the river in order to seek out the spring that supplies it. The river itself is where the phrase is living today.

What Is The Origin Of Whisper In The Wind In Literature?

8 Answers

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