Corfe Castle at sunrise on summer morning from West Hill: o.ivanchenko on Flickr (Click image)
I have been intending to do this post for a while now. I thought that it would be best to wait until the Summer comes. It is officially Summer now but as anyone in England knows the weather has been really awful. Right now if you wanted to flatter anyone then you probably wouldn’t compare them to a summers day – unless you wanted a smack in the mouth that is!
I suppose that it is ok to post this anyway – Shakespeare does acknowledge that Summer is imperfect, there are sometimes rough winds – or the sun can be too hot. I suspect he would have been suprised at the current weather
‘ sometimes it raineth continuously throughout the month of July!’
It is however, a good excuse to show some excellent photos of the English countryside if nothing else! I am heading off on holiday for a week so things might get a bit slow around here for a short time.
English Countryside by sabine.gruenke on Flickr (click image)
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 oft’ is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
Summer Eves by Rob Woolf (rawprints.co.uk - click image)
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 18
William Shakespeare
And finally, all those pictures of England reminded me of this video I saw on YouTube – it has got absolutely nothing to do with things Tudor but I thought it would be good to add.
