Summer’s lease

The source of “summer’s lease hath all too short a date” is from Shakespeare’s sonnet xviii. Shakespeare was writing about a person, by the way, not about the season.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Where has the summer gone? All the flowers that were so vibrant, so beautiful, two weeks ago are now ghosts of their former selves. The coneflowers have faded and gone to seed; the gladiolas are a lost cause; Japanese beetles ravished the Rose of Sharon. The nandina’s leaves show a touch of red. Some of the poplars are more gold than green. Here and there a solitary passion flower still blooms.

Thursday and Friday’s heavy rain and Friday’s rough winds brought down a lot of leaves that were still green. For weeks before the rains came, “the eye of heaven” shone “too hot.” When Maggie and I walked to the paper box before dawn Saturday morning, I wore a jacket. Autumn, still a few weeks away, is already dropping hints: summer is not eternal.

Shakespeare’s poem has lasted 400 years. How long will a blog last?