Another warm and sunny day today – on a Bank Holiday, for a wonder – but there is no mistaking the end of summer feeling in the air. It's been a (mostly) glorious season, and, for a butterfly lover, one that has gone on giving and giving. I thought that Clouded Yellow in Worthing was going to be the last surprise of my butterfly year – but no, this morning, wandering in one of my Lichfield haunts, I was delighted to spot a late (second brood) Brown Argus, a lovely little butterfly that I thought I'd missed, not having seen one in the spring. What a summer it has been... There is a certain melancholy about its ending, but at least it has been a proper summer with proper summer weather – and the beauties of autumn are still to come.
The element of melancholy was inevitably very much to the fore when A.E. Housman turned his mind to the end of summer in this beautiful poem. Its five-line stanzas lend it a different energy from the more usual quatrains – and (spoiler alert) the last line is a killer.
XXXIX (from Last Poems)
When summer's end is nighing
And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
And all the feats I vowed
When I was young and proud.
The weathercock at sunset
Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
That looked to Wales away
And saw the last of day.
From hill and cloud and heaven
The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
And hushed the countryside,
But I had youth and pride.
And I with earth and nightfall
In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
And darkness hard at hand,
And the eye lost the land.
The year might age, and cloudy
The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
Breathed from beyond the snows,
And I had hope of those.
They came and were and are not
And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
That ever can ensue
Must now be worse and few.
So here's an end of roaming
On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
For summer's parting sighs,
And then the heart replies.
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