On the hillside below them, a door standing wide on the yellow light of a shabby hall was a declaration of peace.
The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard
Let me say it’s very difficult—as it is for the majority of the stories and novels that I pluck a stunning sentence from—to choose only one sentence. As Lauren Groff writes in the introduction, “The Transit of Venus is astronomical: as sharp, remote, and dazzling as a celestial body. To read Shirley Hazzard’s masterpiece for the first time is to be immediately submerged into a world in which language and character carry the reader along, gasping, in a current too strong to fight.”
In this sentence, do you feel the suspense? Aren’t you curious about the door standing wide? And the yellow light? Shabby hall? The sentence has a magnetic pull to it, a propulsion that makes you want to keep reading. We should pause here and note the achievement of such a thing. Here, one sentence doing so much suspenseful work to keep the reader reading!
And in that one sentence, economy and compression are hard at work. We have the image of the door standing wide, a yellow light, and a shabby hall.
The Making
This is a left-branching sentence because it opens with the prepositional phrase, “On the hillside below them.”
That phrase delays the subject of the base clause, “a door standing wide on the yellow light of a shabby hall”
What about this long subject? It’s a noun phrase with a lot of modifiers coming after the noun, “door.”
You have
--standing wide (present participial phrase)
--on the yellow light (prepositional phrase)
--of a shabby hall (prepositional phrase)
Now we come to the verb, “was,” which is a linking verb, joining the subject (door) to a word or phrase that tells something about the subject. Here we learn the door was “a declaration of peace.”
Interestingly, Hazzard turns the door into an explicit symbol. As the theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich says: “Symbols are complex, and their meanings can evolve as the individual or culture evolves. A symbol always "points beyond itself" to something that is unquantifiable and mysterious; symbols open up the "depth dimension of reality itself."
Hazzard directly tells you what the door stands for: peace.
One more thing about this sentence. I keep wanting to add the word “open,” to this phrase: “a door standing wide open…” By leaving out the expected word “open,” Hazzard makes me pay closer attention to the sentence and the way it unfolds. It also provides for heightened assonance, bringing closer together “wide” and “light.”
Try it.
Let me know how it goes.
Rarely do I think about ' leaving a word out' to entice a reader. What a beautiful sentence and example of how an omission makes us reread, and think about what is implied. I also appreciate the way you break sentences into their fundamental parts, and explain the relationships between them.
This one was a challenge. I've imitated the general structure of the sentence, but couldn't for the life of me think of a good way to use ellipsis. I tried several times, and here are the few I came up with:
On shelves beside and above his neatly tucked bed his trophies, their silver tarnishing to a dull, flat grey, were a reminder of all that was lost.
From the dark outside her shuttered windows the boom of thunder and the crack of lightning shouted their answer to her meagre measure of courage.
In the deluge and looming dark, so untimely at this hour, in the rolling of thunder and flash of lightning, a small woman held close a sleeping child, a reminder that shelter is possible.
In the attic cavity overhead, muffled scurryings and scratchings were a sign of troubles to come.