Week 10 Cady - Thunderloft

Thunderloft: 

(n.) a thundercloud

“...your forehead resembles what, in some very astonishing poetry, I once saw styled, ‘a blue-piled thunderloft’” (Bronte 399). This is from the novel, Jane Eyre.

So originally when I first looked up this word, I could not find a concrete definition for it. To be honest, this is not uncommon for words from Jane Eyre because it uses many archaic vocabulary that is not still in use today. Thus, I decided to dig deeper. Upon further researching, I found that ‘a blue-piled thunderloft’ is actually a quote from a poem, "The Demoniac: A Poem In Seven Chapters" by Thomas Aird. "The Demoniac" is a tale of a women begging Jesus to help find her lost son. This poem came from a magazine that was published around when Jane Eyre was being written. Even upon finding this poem, there still was no real definition for thunderloft. People mostly believe that it means thundercloud because loft can mean cloud, but the whole thing is still up for discussion. This vocab word actually brought our units full circle because it is in reference to a poem, like the unit we just finished, and the word loft can mean a "pigeon house", connecting it to The Awakening in my mind.