Probably no poet has ever captured the feeling of summer in America as well as Hayward Du Bose and Ira Gershwin in the lyrics from “Summertime.” Lazy and easy-going, indolent and breezy . . . “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. Fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high . . .”

From the old English verse of an anonymous bard, “Sumer is icumen in: Lhude sing cuccu!” to the modern day counterpart by Ezra Pound, the season of the vernal equinox has provided a theme for myriad poets and essayists.

A man named John Heywood made a collection of the earliest English sayings, and he included, “One swallow maketh not summer.”

Shakespeare referred to summer in the famed balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet says, “This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath, may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet”.

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou are more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date . . .”

In King Henry VIII is the expression “sweet as summer”, and in King Henry IV appears the simile, “and gorgeous as the sun of midsummer”.

Soon after the Immortal Bard came John Milton, who wrote: “Such sights as youthful poets dream on summer eves by haunted stream”. A passage in his memorable Paradise Lost reads:

“. . . Thus with the year
Season’s return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or the sight of vernal bloom or summer’s rose,
Of flocks, or heads, or human face divine . . .”

One of England’s most gifted poets was John Keats, who referred to summer in his Ode to Nightingale:

“That thou, light winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease”.

And there are Robert Burns’ famous lines, “Oh my luve is like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June”.

Thomas Noel wrote:
“By the waters of Life we sat together,
Hand in hand, in the golden days
Of the beautiful early summer weather
When skies were purple and breath was praise”.

Said William Oldys: “Three score summers, when they’re gone will appear as short as one”.

Sarah Helen Power Whitman composed these words of tribute to summer:

“The summer skies are darkly blue,
The days are still and bright,
And Evening trails her robes of gold
Through the dim halls of night”.

Always delicate is Emily Dickinson, whose vignette is like fine crystal:

“To see her is a picture,
To hear her is a tune,
To know her an intemperance
As innocent as June”.

Possibly the most relaxing, feet-on-the-table-and-cold-lemonade description of summer is the ever-popular poem of James Russell Lowell. It begins:

“And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays”.

May we suggest you limber up your ear, settle back and reminisce about summer with this collection of songs about Summer conducted by Camarata. They are as warm and languorous as a sunny afternoon in August, with the bees a-buzzin’ above a grassy bower.