Summer

Eero Järnefelt

Summer

Voluptuous in plenty, summer is

Neglectful of the earnest ones who've sought her.

She best resides with what she images:

Lakes windless with profound sun-shafted water;

Dense orchards in which high-grassed heat grows thick;

The one-lane country road where, on his knees,

A boy initials soft tar with a stick;

Slow creeks which bear flecked light through depths of trees.

And he alone is summer's who relents

In his poor enterprisings; who can sense,

In alleys petal-blown, the wealth of chance;

Or can, supine in a deep meadow, pass

Warm hours beneath a moving sky's expanse,

Chewing the sweetness form long stalks of grass.

Timothy Steele

from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin

The line, "summer is neglectful of the earnest ones who've sought her." has given me some pause. Who would that be? Is it the gardeners and farmers to whom summer means the unfolding of their careful plans? Or the person to whom summer signifies the reaching of a goal? That word "sought" seems to infer pursuit. "She best resides with what she images." The word "Image" turned into a verb throws me off. Could it mean that she is in harmony with the one who simply takes in the scenes where she lives? She who is a fullness, an abundance, a generous outpouring, a flourishing, a multiplication, addition (Ha! Take that, Jay Parini, no subtraction here!), an expansion of everything - she smiles at our paltry plans, our miserly notions of Accomplishment, and flings her extravagance in our faces. Flowersflowersflowersleavesleavesleavesfruitfruitfruitfoodfoodfoodfoodand BeautyBeautyBeauty. What accomplishment is greater than this? Let's throw away our lesser goals. Let's lay down in a deep meadow and watch the parade of clouds. Let's be summer's children in her kingdom of bounty.

(And yes, I included this poem mainly because it's about lying down in the grass, one of the great pleasures of life. And here's another poem about it too,  "Silent Noon", by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.)