“I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know.
Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven’t said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.” – Tove Jannson
“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.” – Sylvia Plath
In August the poets and writers are busy. Mary Oliver is scarfing down blackberries while Sylvia Plath contemplates the rain. Tove Jansson – on her island – lights the oil lamp.
Always in August
I am more aware of the rain.
A year ago it came down on my porch
and the lawn and the flat gray sea beyond…
closing me in the great house in the day,
talking to me alone
in my room in the evening as I sat
alone
In bed writing,
surveying
my kingdom from my throne:
the lone streetlight on the corner,
hanging solitary
in a nimbus of light, and beyond it
the gray indistinguishable fog
and the rain sound
blending with the wash of the sea.
– from The Journals of Sylvia Plath
I loved this and such poems and feelings about those in between times, and the way nature is on the change. Makes me also think of the poem ‘Afternoons go Nowhere’ from the collection of that name by Sheenagh Pugh. Though that is for a little later in the year I can feel that time coming. Meanwhile it is good to be here now with the blackberries. Thanks, Josie
I found that Pugh poem here https://serenbooks.wordpress.com/2020/08/21/friday-poem-afternoons-go-nowhere-by-sheenagh-pugh/
Great stuff – going to look for more of her work. Glad to have been pointed in her direction. Thanks Maria.
And cultivated blackberries just don’t taste as good as the ones you picked from the hedgerows in childhood.
Oh you’re welcome. I used to share an office with Sheenagh and she was before that my tutor. I love her work. Thanks for finding that poem! You’re right about the blackberries … Enjoying them now too (feeding my inner child).
Here, on this island, this blessEd island, we know a thing or two about borders! Best not to discuss politics here though!
I also love borders, those between sea and shore or river and bank, earth and sky! And the beginning of August is Lammas, a time for the celebration of the harvest but of course, our agricultural and seasonal heritage means little these days when we can buy our foods from across the globe!
Isn’t the Mary Oliver poem delicious, the Slyvia Plath so raw!
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The unabashed greed and gluttony of the blackberry stuffing is liberating! So many excellent poems on eating and picking blackberries it was a delight to find yet another.
Lovely post, Josie. I can feel autumn coming closer, and I don’t actually mind too much (apart from having to go back to work after the summer break! 😀
What wonderful poems you have chosen. I like that Plath more than many of her more well known works.
talking to me alone
in my room in the evening as I sat
alone
In bed writing,
surveying
my kingdom from my throne:
the lone streetlight on the corner,
Interesting you say that. I find her journal entries more “poetic” than some of her poems. She is a natural prose poet.
And she seemed to have quite a thing about August rain. Elsewhere in the Journals there is this:
“Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: ‘After a heavy rainfall, poems titled ‘Rain’ pour in from across the nation.”
Such lovely pieces for this month of August!
I particularly like the Tove Jansson you’ve used here with it’s sense of a fully lived summer and underlying melancholy.
Do you find Jannson melancholy?
I find her – especially The Summer Book – life affirming and quietly joyful.
It is only melancholy because we cannot live the life that she – and Sophia and her grandmother – lived. And that is sad. that is nostalgia. But we rejoice in the fact that those times existed and gave us Tove’s work. And Tove’s work is life affirming and joyful.
“There is this happy tongue” writes Mary Oliver. Hurrah for the berries of August! We are starting to have some cool nights, signaling that autumn is just around the corner, here in the Boston (USA) area…
Not many signs of relief from the heat and humidity in NYC but you know it is on the way.
Yes…that’s August.