Summer heat

Over recent weeks, it has been hot and sultry in London: not, most of the time, too unbearable in the open air, but a refined and desperate torture on the Tube.  The one relief has been the occasional thunderstorms - so while I share the pleasure in the autumn of the mother in this poem, I also love the breaking heat and startling flashes of energy across the teeming rains of night.  This is Philip Larkin's Mother, Summer, I.

 

My mother, who hates thunder storms,

Holds up each summer day and shakes

It out suspiciously, lest swarms

Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;

But when the August weather breaks

And rains begin, and brittle frost

Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,

Her worried summer look is lost,

And I her son, though summer-born

And summer-loving, none the less

Am easier when the leaves are gone

Too often summer days appear

Emblems of perfect happiness

I can't confront: I must await

A time less bold, less rich, less clear:

An autumn more appropriate.

 

Comments

[Mr Cornflower]

Larkin is wonderful on the feel of the seasons - this is good but I like best the one about autumn which shows us a procession of characters,

"......all silent
Watching winter coming on"

[glo]

Once again, these are sweet childhood memories, and so sweet they are.
Unlike this mother, I always used to love dreadful summer thunderstorms, even when I was a child. I also love very much the minutes just after the end of a storm, when the Nature seems to recover and the air is so special.

I also like the CS Lewis quotation about courage on the right column.