Poems for You
Poems for You
Summer poetry from The Four Seasons anthology
My dear readers and friends, the time has come! Next week is the Summer Solstice, which means that this week, I’m making good on my promise to read the summer section of my little seasonal poetry anthology—The Four Seasons edited by J.D. McClatchy. I looked up, and suddenly, all the trees were dressed in their big, fat, green leaves. Green!! It’s wonderful. The days are long now, and the sun asserts itself, but blessedly, with a cool breeze still in the air, the languid heat of summer hasn’t materialized quite yet.
This lingering of late springtime weather has me…not completely in the mood to write about summer. In fact, I’ve now started this post three separate times and thrown it out the metaphorical, internet window only to start again and still not know what I want to say. Though I prefer cold to heat, I love the summer. It’s a child’s season, and being in it makes me feel like a child. And in defense of heat, at least there’s something fun about taking off all your clothes, versus putting them on, and on, and on against the cold.
Unsurprisingly heat was one theme that repeatedly came up in these summer poems—“The Woof of the Sun” as Henry David Thoreau puts it. Most poems about heat (at least featured in these pages) focus on the stillness it produces. I know, on the basis of memory, that stillness, languorous baking, and listless exhaustion all come in the summer months. But like I said, it’s not really hot yet, and besides that, I feel like I’ve been running around in a flurry of extra activity for the past two weeks.
So, what other themes can we discuss? Hmm. There’s the counterpoint to the heat—the flurry of life and abundance, the excited activity of the natural world. The fullness and the shocking extravagance. There’s the birds, and the colors—the green of it all. The summer in the city, the summer in the suburbs, at the beach, by the pond. The summer wind and the summer storm, in June and in August. And then—there’s death.
I know that summer is the time of bursting life, but it is also the time in which all that life crosses the threshold into decay. Nature knows no stopping point, and summer is like filling up a water balloon on a spout that won’t turn off. It will pop. I know that we can fool ourselves into thinking that spring is birth, summer is life, fall is decline, and winter is death, but we are only fooling ourselves. Life and death hold hands all year round. I know that death makes life beautiful. I know!
All the other times I’ve started and stopped this post, it’s been because I keep ending up at death, and I don’t want to end up at death today. I tried to pick poems that seemed uninterested in death after a first reading. I sat down with them and read them again, more closely, ready to provide you with my amateur analysis, to find a pearl of wisdom to send you off into the weekend with. Each time I found the same thing in the end: death.
These poems are right, and beautiful, and I might even love them, but I don’t want to write about them today. I make the rules here, so instead of the analysis or the pearl of wisdom, I’m going to send you off into the weekend with the poems. Three to be exact—the three that keep floating back into my mind.
Buy a copy of The Four Seasons for yourself here! I will be back in September for Autumn, and we WILL be talking about death then. How could we not?
What’s your favorite summertime poem? I would love to read it.
xx