Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Thursday – First Day of Summer
As this is the first day of summer, I’m sharing two delightful summer poems, one celebrating summer moonlight and one summer mornings. In “Moonlight, Summer Moonlight,” Emily Bronte pictures herself lying a bower such as we might encounter in Midsummer Night’s Dream. From that vantage point, she looks up at the moon and at the swaying trees while “the solemn hour of midnight/ Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere”:
Moonlight, Summer Moonlight
By Emily BronteTis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,
But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.
And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.
Mary Oliver, meanwhile, reminds her heart that “it’s time to come back from the dark” given that it’s a summer morning, with the hills pink and the roses “opening now their soft dresses”:
Summer Morning
Mary Oliver
Heart,
I implore you,
it’s time to come back
from the dark,
it’s morning,
the hills are pink
and the roses
whatever they felt
in the valley of night
are opening now
their soft dresses,
their leaves
are shining.
Why are you laggard?
Sure you have seen this
a thousand times,
which isn’t half enough.
Let the world
have its way with you,
luminous as it is
with mystery
and pain–
graced as it is
with the ordinary.
In life Oliver appears to have been bipolar—at least that’s one way to explain her ecstatic highs and depressed lows—and on this summer morning it sounds like she’s reconnecting with a world she lost sight of when she was wandering “in the valley of night.”
Indeed, she’s offering up a summer morning as a way to negotiate our experiences “with mystery and pain.” She assures readers that if they let such a moment “have its way with you, luminous as it is,” they will find grace even in the ordinary. This goes even for things we have seen “a thousand times.”
So yes, give over your heart to both summer moonlight and summer morning.
