The Mounting Summer, Brilliant and Ominous / Delmore Schwartz

The Mounting Summer, Brilliant and Ominous

A yellow-headed, gold-hammered, sunflower-lanterned
Summer afternoon: after the sun soared and soared
All morning to the marble shining heights of marvellous blue,
Like lions insurgent, bursting out of a great zoo,
As if all vividness poured down, poured out, poured
Over, bursting and breaking in all the altitudes of blaze,
As when the whole ocean rises and rises in irresistable motion, shaking;
The roar of the heart in a shell or the roar of the sea beyond the 

  concessions of possession and the secessions of time's fearful procession, 

  precious even in continuous perishing.

~~
Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)
from Summer Knowledge: New and selected poems, 1959

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Delmore Schwartz biography

Amin010n, Burning sunny day, 2020 (detail). CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Even in the bluest noonday of July / Robert Louis Stevenson

To Mrs. Will. H. Low

Even in the bluest noonday of July,
There could not run the smallest breath of wind
But all the quarter sounded like a wood;
And in the chequered silence and above
The hum of city cabs that sought the Bois,
Suburban ashes shivered into song.
A patter and a chatter and a chirp
And a long dying hiss — it was as though
Starched old brocaded dames through all the house
Had trailed a strident skirt, or the whole sky
Even in a wink had over-brimmed in rain.

Hark, in these shady parlours, how it talks
Of the near autumn, how the smitten ash
Trembles and augurs floods! O not too long
In these inconstant latitudes delay,
O not too late from the unbeloved north
Trim your escape! For soon shall this low roof
Resound indeed with rain, soon shall your eyes
Search the foul garden, search the darkened rooms,
Nor find one jewel but the blazing log.

~~
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
from Underwoods, 1891

[Poem is in the public domain]

Robert Louis Stevenson biography

Ismael Valladolid Torres, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris July 2002.

CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

July's featured poem

 

The Penny Blog's featured poem for July 2025:

Summer 1969, by Michael G. Munoz

The first turn of July heat

And I was growing fast

Leaning into the sun

Like the nascent fan palms sprouting up

[...]

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2012/07/summer-1969.html

I Am a Canadian / John Diefenbaker

I Am a Canadian

I am a Canadian,
a free Canadian,
free to speak without fear,
free to worship God in my own way,
free to stand for what I think right,
free to oppose what I believe wrong,
free to choose who shall govern my country.
This heritage of freedom
I pledge to uphold
for mysef and all mankind.

~~
John G. Diefenbaker (1895-1979)
Hansard, July 1, 1960
(a found poem)

(courtesy Flickr.com)

Penny's Top 20 / June 2025

   

Penny's Top 20

The most-visited poems on  The Penny Blog in June 2025:

  1.  Mind on a Wander, JD Shirk

  2.  Wander-Thirst, Gerald Gould

  3.  Metric Figure, William Carlos Williams

  4.  Large Red Man Reading, Wallace Stevens

  5.  Skating, William Wordsworth

  6.  Daddy, Sylvia Plath

  7.  My Father, Ann Taylor

  8.  June Rain, Richard Aldington

  9.  Esthetique du Mal, Wallace Stevens

10.  June, Folgore de San Geminiano

11.   Spring Again, George J. Dance

12.  A Summer Invocation, Walt Whitman

13.  Laurentian Lure, Arthur S. Bourinot

14.  Ode to Sport, Pierre de Coubertin

15.  June Days, Charles Lotin Hildreth

16.  A June Day, John Todhunter

17.  The Dwarf, Wallace Stevens

18.  In the Fields, Charlotte Mew

19.  May, Folgore de San Geminiano

20. Ballad of the Goodly Fere, Ezra Pound

Source: Blogger, "Stats" 

June / Folgore de San Geminiano

from Of the Months

June

In June I give you a close-wooded fell,
    With crowns of thicket coil'd about its head,
    With thirty villas twelve times turreted,
All girdling round a little citadel;
And in the midst a springhead and fair well
    With thousand conduits branch'd and shining speed,
    Wounding the garden and the tender mead,
Yet to the freshen'd grass acceptable.
And lemons, citrons, dates, and oranges,
    And all the fruits whose savour is most rare,
Shall shine within the shadow of your trees;
    And every one shall be a lover there;
Until your life, so fill'd with courtesies,
    Throughout the world be counted debonair.

~~
Folgore de San Geminiano (?1270-1332?)
translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
from The Early Italian Poets, 1861

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

[]

Folgore de San Geminiano biography
Dante Gabriel Rossetti biography

Peasants picking fruit, from Une Compilation d’œuvres d’Art Médiévales Liées: 

Aux Pommes et aux Vergers, 19th century. Courtesy Orchard Notes.

A June Day / John Todhunter

A June Day

The very spirit of summer breathes to-day,
Here where I sun me in a dreamy mood,
And laps the sultry leas, and seems to brood
Tenderly o'er those hazed hills far away.
The murmurous air, fragrant of new-mown hay,
Drowses, save when martins at gleeful feud,
Gleam past in undulant flight. Yon hillside wood
Is drowned in sunshine, till its green looks grey,
No scrap of cloud is in the still blue sky,
Vaporous with heat, from which the foreground trees
Stand out, each leaf cut sharp. A whetted scythe
Makes rustic music for me as I lie,
Glad in the mirth of distant children blithe,
Drinking the season's sweetness to the lees.

~~
John Todhunter (1839-1916)
from Laurella, and other poems, 1876

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

John Todhunter biography

DrStew82, View from the summit of Bald Mountain, Maine, June 2017.

CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.