Divine tears, fairy footsteps or the sweat of heavens: The delight of dew

Sometimes, when a clear night sky cloaks moist ground, a magic spell is cast. As the sun rises and the dark curtain lifts, a landscape glistening with glassy droplets is revealed. ‘Every thorn-point and every bramble-spear has its trembling ornament: till the wind gets a little brisker, and then all is shaken off, and all the shining jewellery passes away into a common spring morning,’ wrote John Clare in Dewdrops, one of the many works that convey the poet’s fascination with this ephemeral phenomenon.

I share Clare’s enthusiasm. On warm days, I like to get outside early enough that the dew is still damp beneath my feet. Barefoot is best, padding around the garden until my toes begin to tingle; then back inside, the story of my feet’s miniature adventure written in a slippery trail across the kitchen floor.

Dew has mesmerised humankind for millennia. The ancient Greeks attributed the natural spectacle to the dawn goddess Eos, personifying her tears as Ersa, who poured water upon the land. Later, in ancient Rome, Pliny pondered whether dew was ‘the sweat of the heavens, or the saliva that comes from the stars, or the sap that exudes from the air when it is cleansed’. The idea that dew was astral water, trickling down to Earth via the luminous rays of the moon, stuck longest — well into the 17th century, in fact, as evidenced by engravings in the 1677 ‘wordless book’, the Mutus Liber, detailing how this nocturnal distillation might be alchemised to create powerful elixirs and dissolve gold.

Such notions of dew as Heaven-sent were also nurtured by literature. In Andrew Marvell’s metaphysical poem On a Drop of Dew, written in the 1660s, the dew, ‘shed from the bosom of the morn’ and now languishing on Earth, yearns to be reunited with the firmament. It ‘shines with a mournful light,/Like its own tear,/Because so long divided from the sphere,’ he writes. ‘Till the warm sun pity its pain,/And to the skies exhale it back again.’ By contrast, dew is the fuel for adventure in Cyrano de Bergerac’s A Voyage to the Moon (1657) and is used by the intrepid protagonist to take flight, propelling him back to dew’s imagined origin in the sky. ‘I planted my self in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast about me,’ he narrates. ‘Upon which the Sun so violently darted his Rays, that the Heat, which attracted them… carried me up so high, that at length I found myself above the middle Region of the Air.’

Even scientists have been bewitched by the beauty of dew. ‘When from the bright blue vault of heaven, the sparkling constellations shower their mild light over the earth, the flowers of the garden and the leaves of the forest become moist with a fluid of the most translucid nature,’ wrote Robert Hunt, an expert in the physics and chemistry of light, in 1854’s The Poetry of Science. However, by then, our understanding of the world was changing. ‘Science has removed the veil of mystery with which superstition had invested the formation of dew,’ Hunt continued, attributing the phenomenon instead to ‘a condensation of vapour’ acting according to ‘a fixed law of radiation’ — about which more later.

I prefer the Celtic belief that dew is the footprints of fairies who have been making merry in the night. ‘And I serve the Fairy Queen/To dew her orbs upon the green,’ declares a fairy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘I must go seek some dewdrops here, and hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.’ It’s dew’s delicate touch that surely suggested the work of fairies. ‘The fall of dew is the softest way in which water comes into the world; without the slightest sound, much smoother than rain or than natural fountain,’ notes the German philosopher and chemist Jens Soentgen in his 2012 Essay on Dew. In rural Germany, we learn, dew was once thought to enhance growth as a result of the astral life force within it. ‘It was the practice to add a little dew when churning butter to increase the yield,’ he writes. ‘On the other hand, if one were to steal the dew from a farmer’s field, his cows would give less milk.’

Whereas some were adding dew to their food, others — mostly women — were applying it to their faces, believing it a potent beauty tonic that could induce a youthful bloom, reduce rosacea and fade unwanted freckles. May was the optimum time to collect it. ‘They would go forth betimes in the morning, and before sun-rising, into a green field,’ the physician Gerard Boate recalled in 1652’s The Natural History of Ireland. ‘And there either with their hands strike off the dew from the tops of the herbs into a dish, or else throwing clean linnen cloaths upon the ground, take off the dew from the herbs into them and afterwards wring it out into dishes.’

The grassy heights of Edinburgh’s Arthur’s Seat were once a focal point for the most fervent dew-gatherers, who thronged in their thousands. Today, May Day still sees a handful of walkers ascend its summit to wet their faces. Over the years, various health-giving properties have also been ascribed to dew. People dabbed it on their eyes to relieve soreness, ingested it to rebalance emotional energy, and, according to 1593’s A Short Treatise of the Small Pockes, used it to treat ‘rednes of the face and hands after the pockes are gone’. Others, Oliver Cromwell among them, slipped off their stockings to walk on it in the hope of curing gout.

Harvesting dew from a dawn landscape may require patience, but capturing the visual effect on canvas is a feat of genius. Millais feared that such a scene ‘might be unpaintable’, but persevered nevertheless. The result was the atmospheric Dew-Drenched Furze (1889–90), a triumph of humid undergrowth bathed in gossamer light, achieved by virtue of generously applied paint and delicate dry brushing. A century earlier, Constable had achieved the ‘unpaintable’ optical effect seemingly by accident. ‘Look at these landscapes by an Englishman; the ground appears to be covered with dew,’ a visitor to the Paris Salon of 1824 was overheard saying of The Hay Wain — an astonishing achievement for a painting originally titled 'Landscape: Noon'. By contrast, Turner’s Dewy Morning of about 1810, a view of Petworth House in West Sussex from across the lake, was intentionally dewy, although there’s not a single droplet to be seen. Instead, the dew is suggested by the misty veil over the verdant landscape.

It’s perhaps dew’s transience that makes it such a rare and precious subject in paint. ‘But soon shall fly those diamond drops,/The red round sun advances higher,’ announces Clare in his poem Summer Morning. ‘Now let me tread the meadow paths/While glittering dew the ground illumes,’ he entreats. ‘As, sprinkled o’er the withering swaths,/Their moisture shrinks in sweet perfumes.’ I’d like to think that Clare did this shoeless, as I do. What better excuse than dew’s brevity for splashing it on our faces and feet?