Tag Archives: Et in Arcadia ego

Time to Welcome Summer (and refuse the darkness)

Posted on by
2

The author watches the Solstice sunset from Friedrich Point on Lake Pepin, Minnesota.

For 150 years, James Thomson’s The Seasons was one of the most widely read books in the English-speaking world. Its ornate classical style and lack of emotional inwardness fell out of favor in the Romantic era, but it still sits on my shelf along with other great ruminations on the circle of time, like Edwin Way Teale’s quartet of road trips through the American seasons, the “spiritual biographies” of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter compiled by Gary Schmidt and Susan Felch, and the four diminutive volumes of seasonal poetry selected by Robert Atwan.

Essential summer reading.

Thomson’s Summer begins:

From brightening fields of ether fair-disclosed,
Child of the Sun, refulgent Summer comes . . .
Hence let me haste into the mid-wood shade,
Where scarce a sunbeam wanders through the gloom,
And on the dark-green grass, beside the brink
Of haunted stream that by the roots of oak
Rolls o’er the rocky channel, lie at large
And sing the glories of the circling year.

But the poet’s encyclopedic survey of the world beneath the summer sun is not simply an inventory of its pleasures and beauties, for Nature is not uniformly benign. Storms, floods, drought and earthquakes are part of the mix. Et in Arcadia ego. Thomson’s description of a plague (“the great destroyer”) feels ripped from current headlines. Pandemic mutes “the voice of joy,” sickens human communities and empties public spaces. People shelter in place, hoping to escape the “awful rage” of pestilence, as “o’er the prostrate city black Despair / Extends her raven wing.”

The sullen door,
Yet uninfected, on its cautious hinge
Fearing to turn, abhors society:
Dependents, friends, relations, Love himself,
Savaged by woe, forget the tender tie,
The sweet engagement of the feeling heart.

Who among us is not “savaged by woe,” cut off as we are from tender ties and seasonal rituals? But the poet, trusting the Providence “of powers exceeding far his own,” does not leave us there. He envisions the evils of this world subdued within a larger harmony, and even in the time of trial faith knows, impossibly, that all shall be well. “Nature from the storm / Shines out afresh; and through the lightened air / A higher lustre and a clearer calm / Diffusive tremble;  while, as if in sign / Of danger past, a glittering robe of joy, / Set off abundant by the yellow ray, / Invests the fields, yet dropping from distress.”

Summer 2020 does not arrive robed in joy. Tonight’s dark and deadly Trumpist rally in Tulsa, a demonic parody of traditional Summer Solstice affirmations of light and life, seems to augur a summer of darkness. But we must not succumb to the pestilence without­­­­––or the pestilence within. We must live as children of the light, refusing the gloom and resisting the storm. Already, voices are rising across our tormented country, demanding “a higher lustre and a clearer calm.”  And each of us, in ways both great and small, must continue to welcome the light, and to remember our joy.

Enough for us to know that this dark state,
In wayward passions lost and vain pursuits,
This infancy of being, cannot prove
The final issue of the works of God,
By boundless love and perfect wisdom formed,
And ever rising with the rising mind.

 

 

Poetry excerpts are from James Thomson, Summer (1727), part of his quartet, The Seasons (1730).

Sacraments of Summer

Posted on by
4
Charles Courtney Curran, Afternoon in the Cluny Garden, Paris (1889)

Charles Courtney Curran, Afternoon in the Cluny Garden, Paris (1889)

Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered
And spring’s infuriations over and a long way
To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods
Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight
Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.

– Wallace Stevens, “Credences of Summer”

In a short while, at 3:34 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, the sun will reach its apogee of 23 degrees 27 minutes above the equator. When that moment comes, I will go outside to give Summer a proper welcome.

Every June Solstice I open Summer like a fresh novel, anticipating adventurous plots, alluring characters, and a world of fascinations presenting itself to my senses without hurry, as if both reader and text had all the time in the world. Summer is one of our sweetest fictions, suffused with a youthful happiness in a shadowless earthly paradise.

Of course, the livin’ isn’t always easy. Agonies and heartbreak may yet interrupt our revels, along with the heat waves, mosquitoes, sunburn, and poison oak. Summer is when my father died, and a dear friend committed suicide. Et in arcadia ego. In timeless Arcadia, death is still around

Even so, when summer smiles, I remember happiness once more:

Firefly nights and swimming hole days,
cold lemonade on a screened porch,
bare feet on warm ground, grass between my toes,
air-conditioned movies on a hot afternoon,
stack of summer reading by the hammock,
the holy calm of nothing to do,
cottonwoods whispering leafy poems to a quiet river,
the pleasurable sublime of high country thunderstorms,
campfire sparks rising to meet the Milky Way,
Springsteen singing us down some lost highway,
windows rolled down in the warm night air,
stars falling into a hayfield after midnight,
moonlight croquet (a candle at each wicket),
swapping songs around red Sonoma wine,
dancing till dawn on Gatsby’s lawn,
those kisses beneath the stars . . .

Do such moments only defer the inevitable erosion of temporal existence, or are they sacramental foretastes of eternal blessedness? Either way, as Michael Cunningham makes clear in The Hours, the Perfect Moment, like Summer itself, is not a gift to be wasted:

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still somewhat shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness…What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

 

Related posts

That Summer Feeling

Now Welcome Summer