An Aestival Festival: Some Poems for the Summer

"Summer Afternoon," 1865, by Asher Brown Durand. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Public Domain

From generals to lieutenants, the best military commanders study the lay of the land and the weather ahead of any mission. How steep are the hills? Are the valleys bare of vegetation or thick with vines and trees? What’s the heat index? Is rain likely? Failure to account for these factors can lead to defeat before the battle has commenced.

Like these warriors, poets often consider terrain and climate when marshalling their words, using for their verse an environment with which they are familiar and which best fits the mood and intention of the poem. This common-sense practice can make for great poetry, but it may require some extra imagination depending on where the reader lives.

Here’s an example: A young man who makes his home in Minneapolis memorizes Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 18, which begins, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” That evening, he recites it to his fiancée, who smiles and says, “That’s so sweet.” Meanwhile, in Miami, another man declaims this same verse to his bride-to-be. “Summer?” she says, ribbing him. “So, what’s that make me? Hurricane season, temps in the 90s, and dive-bomber mosquitoes?” To put it another way, some of Robert Frost’s New England poems may seem as foreign as a snowman to a kid living in the Mississippi Delta.

Remaining alert to this provinciality of poetics—that summer is not only in the mind of the beholder but also where his feet happen to be planted—let’s take a look at some poetry of the season.

The Bounties of Mother Nature

"An Allegory of Summer," 17th century, by Louis de Caullery. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Public Domain

Just as summer calls us to barbeques, hiking, sandcastles, gardening, or relaxing with drink in hand in the twilight, it summons poets with the same message. Woodlands, fields, gardens, and the seashore are celebrated in and of themselves for their joys and beauties. At the end of “Summer Sun,” for instance, Robert Louis Stevenson personifies the sun as a green-thumbed gardener:

Meantime his golden face around He bares to all the garden ground, And sheds a warm and glittering look Among the ivy’s inmost nook.

Above the hills, along the blue, Round the bright air with footing true, To please the child, to paint the rose, The gardener of the World, he goes.

In Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” it is a fairy who brings the raiment of summer to the woodland and who answers Puck’s question, “How now, spirit? Whither wander thou?” with a song fixed on the natural world:

And I serve the Fairy Queen, To dew her orbs upon the green. The cowslips tall her pensioners be; In their gold coats spots you see, Those be rubies, fairy favors, In those freckles live their savors: I must go seek some dewdrops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.

"Moonlit Night," 1850s, by Ivan Ayvazovsky. Oil on canvas. Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, Yekaterinburg, Russia. Public Domain

From the Society of Classical Poets comes C.B. Anderson’s short poem “Summer Concerts.”

The katydids and stridulant cicadas Regale us with their aestival sonatas.

At night, surrounded by the song of crickets, We listen just as though we’d paid for tickets.

Of course, not everyone takes pleasure in this orchestra, and surely no one is a fan of mosquitoes. Mossie is Australian slang for mosquito, and in her humorous “Mossie Malice” Susan Jarvis Bryant, a Brit now living in Texas, strikes a blow against these summer pests:

Now, swat in hand, I plot to kill such irksome quirks of Earth’s ill will . . . I’ll swish and squish and smash and smite until those suckers cannot bite!

The Children of Summer