SUMMER REGAINED
Beston, Henry
Summer Regained By HENRY BESTON Nobleboro. Maine THE SUNLIGHT was without warmth, the wind cold, and from field to field the earth so recently freed of snow lay soggy and dead and cold and...
...Man does not live by ideas and things but by symbols, and I am religiously grateful that I live where I know the night, the true, the old night, and the fiery promise of the rising of the sun...
...Because it was April, the vesture of last year's grass which covered the sod had dried in the chilly light, and short and worn now as a kind of worthless fur, rose up evilly, ready to take fire and spread headlong into the woods or to rush, with or against the wind, towards the foundations of the house...
...he is also dispossessed of his world...
...only in the night, indeed, is there open and seasonal change...
...cracks like field paths next ran from the older of these openings to both the eastern and the western shore...
...A former editor of The Atlantic Monthly and The Living Age, he is the author of many books, including "Full Speed Ahead," "Starlight Wonder Book," "The Outermost House," "The Book of Gallant Vagabonds," "Herbs and The Earth," and "The St...
...The people of the farm country, too, were making a beginning of outdoor work, and outdoor sounds came pleasantly across the fields in the genial peacefulness of the country morning...
...and now and then as I worked outdoors, I could hear a kind of practice song addressed to space from some swaying twig of the "high-top" apple tree...
...Gone was that strange, empty stillness of the depth of winter in the higher north, that intensity of quiet which so fills space when a long storm has blown itself out and come to an end in the snow-muffled and darkening afternoon...
...Across the heavens of spring, arching the cold earth below, move the winter constellations into the April glow of the west, some better seen than in early winter, others standing on their solemn heads, and all sinking together, configuration by configuration, bright star and paler star, toward the ragged wall of forest spires raised against the last of evening and the first of early night...
...It was still covered with an uneven floor of ice and a seasonal snowfall fused together, but whole regions of the water below had darkened through the thin, rain-colored level, and far and wide over the surface, like craters on the moon, pools stood in the ice reflecting with a mirror gleam the light of the northern day...
...if western man could only forget for awhile that he is a "political animal...
...The liberated water then advanced in a broad spearhead towards the south...
...Lawrence" for the Rivers of America Series...
...no flash of lightning has ever been the double of another when it fell fiery in the night, and the thunder rolled across a darkness,, taken by surprise...
...We need among many other things a few new prayers...
...What he needs to remember is that he is a creature of the sun and the moon, the rain and the snow, and the onward course of change which is the being of this earth...
...Yet no two waves have ever been exact images and repetitions one of the other...
...Alone in the landscape, the pond held a sure promise of the spring...
...Spring comes slowly up this way...
...The morning sounds moving across the earth, I noticed, were now the sounds of spring...
...The pageant of Nature is a spectacle of infinite variation within a given and familiar pattern...
...So it was this spring at the farin with the turn of the year...
...The pond last year opened on a bright day of woolpack cloudlets with a northwest wind giving us a fine show of blue, wind-ruffled waters and sailing ice floes still picturesquely white...
...Today he is not only in some curious and rather terrible way dispossessed of himself...
...So a truce to noble schemes, grandiose visions, constitutions, and ballots for awhile...
...This spring the pond simply melted itself open on two mild and rather pallid days...
...For a fortnight or even a scant month...
...Maine THE SUNLIGHT was without warmth, the wind cold, and from field to field the earth so recently freed of snow lay soggy and dead and cold and pallid-brown...
...The great patterns were followed and their limitations observed, and at the same time everything was fresh and new...
...Such a being, no matter how great his technical skills and power over matter, will never advance the welfare of humanity...
...Incoming waves of ocean have reared themselves up and toppled ashore ever since the earth rose from the seas...
...to quote a line from Coleridge's Christabel...
...The earth was awake...
...and presently there stood the pond as we knew it the greater part of the year...
...He plays with human beings, I often think, as some creature outside of man might play with them, and always to their hurt...
...and let us try to regain something of sheer animal faith and the joy which is its natural reward...
...The earlier birds had returned, the robins, the bluebirds, and the song-sparrows...
...little advance seems to be taking place in the year...
...Looking down and across the sodden fields, one first saw spurs of open water forming at the southern extremities of the two islands which lie off the farm...
...HENRY BESTON, noted naturalist and author, has contributed much to The Progressive in recent years, especially Us "Country Chronicle" columns subsequently published in book form...
...and we often have such a time of waiting after the disappearance of the snow...
...On the following morning, a bright and cheerful one, it lay twinkling in the eastern sunlight and the more northerly wind as if it had never known winter and its grim rigidities...
...There was a new mystery of- sound, a new music in the leafless but now supple and well-budded hardwoods near the farm house door: Even the "snake-tailed" winds-—to use a Greek adjective—had a different score, for wind over snow has one sound, and wind over open earth quite another...
Vol. 14 • June 1950 • No. 6
