Hesitating summer and a tribute to the woman in white

Summer’s been teasing us this year. It came early in England – or was that a glorious Spring? At any rate, the flowers came out and the trees covered themselves in leaves.

But then it slipped away again, as though it had a better place to be, and left us glum and grey and rain-sodden. Why, we were even cold. We began to wonder whether it had really been there at all, and I had to go back and see the leaves still covering the trees to convince myself that it had.

One day we even had summer to the left,
spring to the right

Now it seems to be sneaking back again. A patch of sun here, a little heat there. And the plants, smarter than we are, have been reacting, growing like weeds (especially the weeds, that poor Danielle has to spend so much time pulling out): they know that the rain was good, though we complained about it, and that sun is coming behind it to make things better still.

But summer hasn’t yet wholly made up its mind to stay with us. The grey keeps coming back, even the occasional pattering of rain. It’s like a child forced reluctantly to visit an aged relative: he’s there, but not really in the company, and can’t wait to get away again.

So it’s comforting to know that it was ever thus, there’s nothing new in this sense that we’re perhaps being cheated by a summer that hasn’t entirely decided to join us. There’s nothing new, either, in the knowledge that in time it will show up and we just need the patience to give it the time it needs.

No one I know sang the seasons better than the woman in white, the glorious Emily Dickinson, back there in Massachusetts the century before last. And, to celebrate the 1st of June and a wonderful poet, here’s how she described this reluctant indecision on the part of summer.

These are the days when birds come back, 
A very few, a bird or two, 
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies put on 
The old, old sophistries of June,— 
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bee, 
Almost thy plausibility 
Induces my belief,

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear, 
And softly through the altered air 
Hurries a timed leaf!

Oh, sacrament of summer days, 
Oh, last communion in the haze, 
Permit a child to join,

Thy sacred emblems to partake, 
Thy consecrated bread to break, 
Taste thine immortal wine!

Enjoy the summer! It’s on the way.

(My apologies, naturally, to anyone in the Southern Hemisphere)

The woman in white

Picture a young woman living in her childhood home, with memories, comforts, sorrows all about her. At the back is a garden that grows and changes through the year, blazing and subsiding, following and moulding her moods.

As she grows older, it’s the sorrows that grow with her. Death haunts her. She chooses men as mentors rather than lovers, but they die around her, some of them lamentably young: one who had been sending her the books that fuelled a blossoming imagination, at only 25. ‘Some of my friends are sleeping,’ she sighs, ‘sleeping the churchyard sleep.’

She is hemmed in, at first metaphorically but soon literally. And voluntarily. She stops leaving town, even for short journeys. Next it is her house. Increasingly, it is her room, except to return to the garden. She starts to dress only in white: ‘a solemn thing – it was – I said – a Woman – White – to be.’ She would rather conduct conversations with visitors from behind a door than face to face.

And yet, she’s a social being. But at a distance. She prefers to correspond with her friends, her tutors, her companions in thought. And correspond she does, prolifically, hundreds of letters. With one in later life she exchanges letters every Sunday, since they both prefer communicating with each other to communing with their co-religionists. ‘Tuesday,’ she says, of the day after she receives his letters, ‘is a deeply depressed day.’

For words are her consolation. Words that well out of her, words that capture essence, words that express what escapes most of us.

Yet generally we need a subject before we can produce words. In her room, what could she find to talk about? Certainly, hers was a life not marked by dramatic event. Except of course for death, and mortality, immortality and eternity are recurring themes.

But spellbinding words don’t have to have grand themes. From her window, in her garden there was more than enough to paint: the slow effects of time, the changing of the light and the colours, the succession of the seasons. And with her words she painted them all.



The summer came late in England this year. Not fashionably late, to ensure that we were all ready and waiting before it arrived. Practically at the end of the party, with some of the guests already drifting away to more congenial settngs, it showed up like someone who has been out to dinner with more favoured friends before making a token appearance among us.

That hasn’t stopped it dazzling us with its charms. The summer’s far too vain to turn up looking less than its most impressive, if it turns up at all. Here in the South of England we’ve had the pleasure of warmth, without the oppression of heat; sudden blazing sunrises; floods of horizontal light in the afternoon; majestic sunsets flowing into balmy evenings. 

But summer's late arrival has not been free of consequences. Glorious they may be, but those sunsets come much too soon. I need a bike light these days for the ride home from the station. And when I take my dog Janka for her morning walk, as often as not I have to wait for the sun to show itself.

The sun keeps Janka and me waiting in People's Park

So it was with a shiver of recognition that I listened, out on a walk, to these words of the woman in white:

As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away,
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.

There is a strange poignancy in hearing a poem that expresses the very feelings you're experiencing.

The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.

Summer was a gentle guest here too, so welcome when it turned up at last. But now it’s leaving us just as it left her. A melancholy moment, and yet less so because I know I’m sharing a sentiment so delicately expressed by that wordsmith in white, a century and a half ago, sitting in her room or in her garden in Amherst, Massachussets.

For that consolation  –  thank you, Emily Dickinson.