The Summer Lodger: Longfellow, Fergusson, and Pasternak’s July

July 2, 2020

This week, we continue to welcome the hot, thunderous enchantment that is July—a month that enters our gardens like a restless guest, full of fragrance, fire, and surprises.

The air hums with heat, and the evenings glimmer with the gold of long, lazy light. It is a season of abundance and exhaustion, when the gardener’s hat becomes both armor and crown, and the slightest breeze feels like grace.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—who saw nature through both the eyes of a poet and a philosopher—gave us a portrait of summer so luminous it feels almost holy:

Then followed that beautiful season,
Called by the pious Acadian peasants the Summer of All-Saints!
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new - created in all the freshness of childhood.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American poet and educator

What gardener has not felt this sacred pause of light and stillness?

The garden, drenched and magnificent, seems reborn every morning. The air itself feels touched with reverence, as though time slows to admire the world’s green handiwork.

July, in Longfellow’s hands, becomes a kind of earthly paradise, full of innocence regained after spring’s toil.

Across the sea, the Scottish poet Robert Fergusson offers a song of open fields and summer pleasure.

His verses, written in the soft lilt of his homeland, breathe of ripe barley and the joy of long daylight:

In July month one bonny morn,
When Nature's rokelay green
Was spread over like a rigg of corn
To charm our roving evening.
— Robert Fergusson, Scottish poet, Leith Races

Fergusson’s “rokelay green” describes a shawl of nature—summer’s cloak thrown over the land in shades of emerald and gold.

One can almost feel the warmth of it, the heady sweetness of wild grasses brushing one’s calves.

It is the season when the hours between twilight and full dark feel endless, and laughter carries far across a meadow.

And then, Boris Pasternak—who could transform weather into character—brings July fully to life.

His “guest” is not merely a month but a mischievous house spirit, invading every corner of domestic life with thunder and scent:

A ghost is roaming through the building,
And shadows in the attic browse;
Persistently intent on mischief
A goblin roams about the house.
He gets into your way, he fusses,
You hear his footsteps overhead,
He tears the napkin off the table
And creeps in slippers to the bed.
With feet unwiped he rushes headlong
On gusts of draught into the hall
And whirls the curtain, like a dancer,
Towards the ceiling, up the wall.
Who is this silly mischief-maker,
This phantom and this double-face?
He is our guest, our summer lodger,
Who spends with us his holidays.
Our house is taken in possession
By him, while he enjoys a rest.
July, with summer air and thunder—
He is our temporary guest.
July, who scatters from his pockets
The fluff of blow-balls in a cloud,
Who enters through the open window,
Who chatters to himself aloud,
Unkempt, untidy, absent-minded,
Soaked through with smell of dill and rye,
With linden-blossom, grass and beet-leaves,
The meadow-scented month July.
— Boris Pasternak, Russian poet and writer, July

What a marvel of imagery!

One can almost hear the drumming of rain on windowpanes and smell the pungent perfume of dill, rye, and linden drifting in on a midsummer breeze. Pasternak’s July is cheeky, tender, wild—a month that makes itself at home whether you invite it or not. It sweeps through the rooms with bare feet and laughter, leaving behind both chaos and beauty.

In our gardens, it does much the same. July trespasses gently, scattering petals across the pathways, pushing beans up the trellis, gilding the air with pollen.

We who tend the soil can only watch and marvel.

The storms may come, the sun may blaze—but this is the month that teaches us to live like the flowers do: heads high, roots deep, drinking it all in.

So welcome, unruly, golden July.

May your warmth linger on our skin and your restless energy in our hearts.