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

The World Cup and England

Well, it was fun while it lasted, England’s uncharacteristically long run in this year’s football World Cup!  And many congratulations to France for their victory.  Of course, I am a complete lightweight really: I don’t usually follow the leagues, don’t know the players, and can’t call myself a dedicated supporter of any team.  I also admit that in ‘ordinary time’ I am put off by many of the trappings that seem to go with modern football: the colossal sums of money that change hands, along with the poor losers and egos and silly haircuts and showing off.  And it is always disappointing that the teams are seldom made up from residents or natives of the towns their teams represent, so it is sometimes difficult to see in the major clubs anything more than big businesses.  But the World Cup… when the World Cup comes round, I find myself being drawn in…

Perhaps it is because the names of the countries do mean something and, however modestly, their teams represent their people, or because the World Cup provides an arena for a natural friendly rivalry between nations, all competing for the harmless prize of an excuse for a celebration.  Part-timers like me are reminded that the tapering grid of fixtures, the ladder to the trophy, can be dressed with all the devices of narrative — the heroes, the villains, the allies, the antagonists, the climaxes and anticlimaxes, the chances and near misses and the deus ex machina and history made or repeating itself — and we learn again that well-played football really can be a beautiful sight.

And at home in England, too, the air changes.  Out come the flags, for a start: there is something I have always loved about flags and banners and coats of arms, and it is cheering to see the cross of St George fluttering optimistically from the roof of many a hatchback, or undulating with dignity from first-floor double-glazing, or draped across the entire flank of a Transit van.  This year’s England team have also seemed a likeable bunch, at least on the pitch, and Gareth Southgate a very decent manager.  It must have been just before the Panama game in the group stages (6-1 to England!) that the pull really became irresistible: perhaps England were not going to do too badly and I really was going to have to pay attention.

This July has been particularly dry and hot; parts of England have now gone without rain for five or six weeks.  We are in a perpetual summer like Narnia’s winter: the days are almost unfailingly bright and hot, and the sun high and relentless.  The green blade has been baked to the colour of parchment and the parks are beige in their desiccation.  It has been as if the weather were holding its breath; the unusually good progress of the football team abroad coincided with a heightened summeriness at home.  So as the fleet-footed men went further and further on, surging to victory over Panama, surviving a penalty shoot-out against Columbia, defeating even Sweden outright, the sense of a season extraordinary twice over, of unbroken sun and nearly unbroken success at football, gathered until, by the semi-final, it was almost as intense as the ripe heat.  A colleague from work reported deserted stations and quiet streets in London at seven in the evening on a weekday.  This is the sort of othertimeliness we now tend to have only at Christmas and New Year.

Alas, it was not to last.  But yes, this rare spell of togetherness had not been unpleasant, I reflected, as I watched Gareth Southgate moving like a priest among his men after the defeat to Croatia, ministering to them in their suffering.  I am used to the margins when it comes to national feeling in Britain, as a Mass-goer, Brexit ditherer, lover of metrical verse, monarchist, Gothic-Revival-Revivalist and so on (which is not to complain or feel sorry for myself: nobody forced me to hold these positions and this is the path that I have to take).  So, when some popular tide of feeling rises in Britain that is hopeful and well-meaning, a movement that is not a confection of the media and in which I can participate with a clear conscience, well, it is rare enough to be worth savouring.  A tension is eased; there might even be a sensation of relief.  Perhaps a longing for togetherness without a clear source of it, and an aversion to isolation, explain why there are so many bandwagons trundling around these days.

It is just a shame that we seem not to be able to unite ourselves around anything more substantial than football.  That is not to say that football is insubtantial: both professional and amateur football produces a certain amount of genuine camaraderie and local feeling that it would be wrong to overlook.  And there is an extent to which it is more than a matter of life and death.  But human beings need really quite substantial bonds to keep them in harmonious neighbourliness.  Is support for the football team really the most that England has in common?  Some are fairly sure we all know what we are against, but what are we for?  What shall we build for the next generation?  I don’t ask this question in hope of a grand answer, with the world stage in mind, but am thinking more of the smallness, the localness, the details of public life.  If football really had come home on Sunday, to what sort of place would it have been welcomed?