Seasonal:

Summer Sizzle

A potpourri of poetry and prose

MARKING THE CHANGING SEASONS

This page is updated throughout each season

Extract from Larkrise to Candleford by Flora Thompson

In summer what grass there was on the green was cut with the scythe by the man who owned the donkey which grazed there.  It is doubtful if he had any legal right to the grass, but even if not, his gain in donkey fodder was well repaid to the community by the newly cut hay scent which seemed to hang about the village all summer.  One of Laura’s most lasting impressions of Candleford Green was that of leaning out of her bedroom window one soft, dark summer night when the air was full of new-made hay and elderflower scents.  It could not have been late in the evening, for a few dim lights still showed on the opposite side of the green and some boy or youth, on his way home, was whistling ‘Annie Laurie’. Laura felt she could hang there for ever, drinking in the soft, scented night air.

Extract from Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

On a June morning in 1923 Clarissa Dalloway, the glittering wife of a Member of Parliament, is preparing for a grand party that evening.  Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. must be one of the most well-known opening lines.   

It was the middle of June.  The War was over, except for someone like Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven – over.  It was June.  The King and Queen were at the Palace.  And everywhere , though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it’ wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, living it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate’ to give her party.