A Glimpse of Summer

Last night, in the late twilight, but before it was dark enough for any stars to show, Venus blazed towards the western horizon with the crescent Moon and Jupiter nearby. This brought the approaching magic of the Midsummer season in spite of the coolness of the day. Yesterday began with rain but by evening the skies were a clear blue with hardly a cloud. Later, in the half-dark, I heard a night bird calling : a single note followed by a double note. What was it? Not an owl, though their calls are frequent through the woods across the valley at night. It haunted me to sleep.

Today it is cloudy again. No rain, but the woodland soil is wet underfoot. The stream rushes down the valley edged along its wet banks and up the rocky sides with beds of golden saxifrage. I sit, as often, on the seat by the well and drift into summer on the sound of the rushing waters. The small garden by the well-side is in full bloom. The meadows are lush with green speckled with yellow buttercups. The wood greening to shade as the leaf cover fills the branches. The path from the well to the ancient yew winds through a deeper shade past the younger yew trees that surround it.

As I emerge from the yew bower back into the light, Summer steals surreptitiously out of Spring.

The Merry Month of May

In somer when the leves spryng
The bloschems on every bowe
So mery doyt the berdys syng
Yn wodys mery now.

So one of the medieval Robin Hood ballads.

Merry (myrige), 'mirthful' (as the birds sing), 'pleasant' (as the woods are) all in the merry month of May. Robin and his merry men (outlaws who were not merry until they danced in the May Games – men in green following Robin from grisly guise to Green God) leading revels for the May Queen and all her wanton company under the leaves of lyne.

Love trysts in the greenwood: Dafydd ap Gwilym lingering under “May’s sweet branches” setting up an altar to love “among the birch and hazel, the mantles of May”. The sensuous sweetness of all those blossoming boughs, ribbons of white across a patchwork of green as the hedgerows come alive with the scents of Summer : hawthorn and elder, the air heavy with their pheromones. The bosky shade of copses, small groves, whispy strips of tree cover adopt the depths of forests as the glamour of the greenwood is cast by every green tree.

Dafydd asked Summer where it came from and received the reply ‘Annwfn’. So the Otherworld is with us for a while as the pulse of Spring brings Summer to life.

Little John said to Robin “It is a full fayre time in a mornyng of May”. And Ariel, freed to live as an airy spirit, sings:

Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough

released by Prospero, to inhabit a perpetual season of Summer. 


As for us, time-bound as we are, we should follow Dunbar’s advice while we can:

(adapted from an inscription by David Jones)