JULY.
Loud is the summer’s busy song,
The smallest breeze can find a tongue,
While insects of each tiny size
Grow teasing with their melodies,
Till noon burns with its blistering breath
Around, and day dies still as death.
The busy noise of man and brute
Is on a sudden lost and mute;
Even the brook that leaps along,
Seems weary of its bubbling song,
And so soft its waters creep,
Tired silence sinks in sounder sleep;
The cricket on its bank is dumb,
The very flies forget to hum;
And, save the wagon rocking round,
The landscape sleeps without a sound.
The breeze is stopp’d, the lazy bough
Hath not a leaf that danceth now;
The taller grass upon the hill,
And spider’s threads are standing still;
The feathers dropp’d from moorhen’s wing,
Which to the water’s surface cling,
Are steadfast, and as heavy seem,
As stones beneath them in the stream;
Hawkweed and groundsel’s fanny downs
Unruffled keep their seedy crowns;
And in the oven-heated air
Not one light thing is floating there,
Save that to the earnest eye
The restless heat seems twittering by.
Noon swoons beneath the heat it made,
And flowers e’en within the shade,
Until the sun slopes in the west
Like weary traveler, glad to rest
On pillow’d clouds of many hues;
Then Nature’s voice its joy renews,
And checkered field and grassy plain,
Hum with their summer songs again,
A requiem to the day’s decline,
Whose setting sunbeams coolly shine,
As welcome to day’s feeble powers,
As falling dews to thirsty flowers.
John Clare.