Thanksgiving for a Fair Summer

The Malvern Hills seen from fields east of Whittington, Worcestershire, in late August 2021.

Does it come about now, the cusp between summer and autumn?  Or has it already passed?  Or is it still to arrive?  The change hides deep in the veins and roots of things, like the turning of a tide, or the recognition of a truth.  Elizabeth Jennings smelled it before she could see it:

Now watch this autumn that arrives

In smells.  All looks like summer still;

Colours are quite unchanged, the air

On green and white serenely thrives.

Heavy the trees with growth and full

The fields.  Flowers flourish everywhere.    [1]

Those lines are a perfect description of days such as Monday was in south-eastern England, though in suburban London there was no hint of smoke of the kind that awoke autumn for Elizabeth Jennings.  Summer still, then — but then Tuesday, with a lessening of the haze or a change in its quality, throwing down a more golden light from a bluer sky, maturing the palette into that of an illuminated manuscript, brought about an anagnorisis of sorts.  On the Common the crickets still sizzle in the parchment-yellow grasses, and there are startling splashes of colour from the thistles and gorse, though the cow-parsley is going over.  The trees are, yes, ‘heavy with growth’, and dark with it, too, as dark as they are green; some already bear rashes and outbreaks of rust, but, less brazenly, even where all seems green at first glance, there is a dustiness, a mauveness, a wine-darkness in the shadows.  It is the purple of finished splendour, of growth itself grown old: the summer is an empire whose conquests are complete.

But the seasons always turn to linger a few times before they are quite gone, and I rather suppose that even these incongruous days of the high twenties are not quite the end.  ‘Ambiguity’ is Jennings’ word for it — 

Summer still raging while a thin 

Column of smoke stirs from the land 

Proving that autumn gropes for us.

I have been trying to work out which should come first: the poem from which these lines are taken, Song at the Beginning of Autumn, or Ruth Pitter’s free-verse Thanksgiving for a Fair Summer.  Perhaps Pitter follows Jennings, even though she is describing weather like today’s.  ‘We had thought summer dead,’ she says —

But now hot camomile in headlands grows,

Strong-smelling as from toil of reaping: bees

Their delicate harvest in the rusty rows

Of scarlet bean, and woodbine that still blows,

Though flower with berry, gather and do not cease;

No mushroom yet, for dryness of the leas;

No leaf too early sere, for droughty root,

Drops from the trees,

But grave broad green guards the thick purple fruit.

The pandemic has taught me much that I have needed to learn about the passage of the seasons, and not only of the seasons, but of the details of the seasons.  Still more has it taught me that they cannot be pinned down by the observer or the poet.  ‘When I said autumn, autumn broke,’ says Jennings, but she is speaking of the memories and associations that autumn, or its herald, releases into her mind.  All the same, there is undoubtedly a counterpoint between the turns of the seasons and the moods of the mind.  For days like these, days of mingled moods, signposting the seasons — and even for those lacklustre, overcast days against which they stand out — I follow Ruth Pitter, and give thanks.

So for the sun

That all men love and understand,

Lo here is one

In gratitude lifts either hand:

O dearest land!

Heaven give harvests without end,

Heaven mend our quarrels, cure our ills,

And the whole peace of heaven descend

On all the English plains and hills!

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[1]    Emma Mason (ed.), Elizabeth Jennings: The Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012), p. 

[2]    Along with two other poems, Thanksgiving for a Fair Summer can be found on p. 279 of The New English Weekly, 7 July, 1932 (vol. I, no. 12), or p. 11 of the PDF document at this link: www.modernistmagazines.com/media/pdf/294.pdf

The Common yesterday

Happy Oak Apple Day!

I have been reminded (by the blog ‘Once I was a Clever Boy’, via the British Catholic Blogs list) that today, 29th May, is Oak Apple Day.  (I shouldn’t have forgotten, but all the days are running into each other)…  A happy celebration of Charles II’s Restoration to all readers!

(An Oak Apple, by the way, is a gall, from one particular kind of which iron gall ink was once made).

Under the boughs of a local oak, 29 May 2020.

‘Oak Apples’ and ink for England

For reasons of shortage of time, no doubt in common with much of the rest of the country, this blog failed in two respects to mark the 29th of May, last Sunday.  Firstly, it was mysteriously silent on the subject of Chesterton, whose birthday it was.  Then the second unmarked occasion was Oak Apple Day, one of those English traditions that deserve vigorous revival.  It marks the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and was in fact a public holiday from that date until 1859.  The ‘oak apples’ of the name are a kind of plant gall, and these or sprigs of oak were worn to recall Charles II’s escape from the Roundheads, hiding himself inside an oak tree after the Battle of Worcester.  Oak Apple Day traditions still survive in some English towns and villages — and it was a delight to wake up and hear it mentioned on Radio 3’s Breakfast programme — but there’s no reason why every parish should not cast off care and cynicism and keep this (and other) traditions unashamedly alive.

The previous week I had happened to learn that a particular kind of oak gall has a significance to English history even greater than this tradition.  There is a particular species of wasp which, when it lays its eggs in an oak tree, induces a unique kind of gall.  This can be ground and mixed with iron sulphate and water to produce an ink that is both cheap and, importantly, indelible.  This ‘iron gall ink’ was used in this country in important documents from the ninth almost to the twentieth century, not least in the Magna Carta.  And this ink has lasted to our own day, as explained in the extract from Oak Tree: Nature’s Greatest Survivor (B.B.C. 4) below:

So it turns out not only that oak apples owe their festival to an episode of English history, but that English history itself owes its survival largely to oak apples.  Is this perhaps an even better reason to reclaim the 29th May for them?