Summer

Summer is one of the four traditional seasons, delineated by hot weather.

• In December I'll make your block feel like summer.
  • 50 Cent, "What Up Gangsta" (2003), Get Rich or Die Tryin‍'‍, New York: Shady Records

• Summer is icumen in,
  Lhude sing cuccu!
  • Anonymous, Song Summer Is Icumen In

• Summer has come and passed; the innocent can never last.
  • Billie Joe Armstrong, "Wake Me Up When September Ends", American Idiot (2004), California: Reprise Records

• Yeah, I like it when the girls stop by in the summer. Do you remember? Do you remember, when we met that summer? New Kids On The Block, had a bunch of hits. Chinese food makes me sick and I think it's fly when girls stop by for the summer... Think about that summer and I bug, because I miss it.
  • Richard B. Cronin, "Summer Girls" (1999), LFO, Arista Records

• The loorie brought to his cinnamon nest.
  The bee from the midst of its honey quest,
  And open the leaves of the lotus lay
  To welcome the noon of the summer day.
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The London Literary Gazette (6th September 1823), 'The Bayadere II'

• That beautiful season
  the Summer of All-Saints!
  Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
  Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), Part I, Stanza 2.

• Very hot and still the air was,
  Very smooth the gliding river,
  Motionless the sleeping shadows.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha (1855), Part XVIII, line 54.

• But how many merry monthes be in the yeere?
  There are thirteen, I say;
  The midsummer moone is the merryest of all,
  Next to the merry month of May.
  • Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar [1]

• The summer dawn's reflected hue
  To purple changed Loch Katrine blue,
  Mildly and soft the western breeze
  Just kiss'd the lake, just stirr'd the trees,
  And the pleased lake, like maiden coy,
  Trembled but dimpled not for joy.
  • Walter Scott, Lady of the Lake (1810), Canto III, Stanza 2.

• Summer's parching heat.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II (c. 1590-91), Act I, scene 1, line 81.

• The middle summer's spring.
  • William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595-96), Act II, scene 1, line 82.

• Now is the winter of our discontent
  Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
  And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
  In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
  • William Shakespeare, Richard III (c. 1591), Act I, scene 1, line 1.

• Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
  Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
  • William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, XVIII (18).

• Thy eternal summer shall not fade.
  • William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, XVIII (18).

• Summer, summer, summertime
  time to sit back and unwind.
  • Will Smith, "Summertime", Homebase (1991)

• Then came the jolly sommer, being dight
  In a thin silken cassock, coloured greene,
  That was unlyned all, to be more light.
  • Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1589-96), Book VII, Canto VII, Stanza 29.

• In winter I get up at night,
  And dress by yellow candle-light.
  In summer quite the other way
  I have to go to bed by day.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, In Winter I get up at Night

• From brightening fields of ether fair-disclosed,
  Child of the Sun, refulgent Summer comes,
  In pride of youth, and felt through Nature's depth;
  He comes, attended by the sultry Hours,
  And ever-fanning breezes, on his way.
  • James Thomson, The Seasons, Summer (1727), line 1.

• All-conquering Heat, O, intermit thy wrath!
  And on my throbbing temples, potent thus,
  Beam not so fierce! incessant still you flow,
  And still another fervent flood succeeds,
  Pour'd on the head profuse. In vain I sigh,
  And restless turn, and look around for night;
  Night is far off; and hotter Hours approach.
  • James Thomson, The Seasons, Summer (1727), line 451.

• Patient of thirst and toil,
  Son of the desert, e'en the Camel feels,
  Shot through his wither'd heart, the fiery blast.
  • James Thomson, The Seasons, Summer (1727), line 965.

• What does winter or autumn or spring or summer know of memory. They know nothing of memory. They know that seasons pass and return. They know that they are seasons. That they are time. And they know how to affirm themselves. And they know how to impose themselves. And they know how to maintain themselves. What does autumn know of summer. What sorrows do seasons have. None hate. None love. They just pass.
  • Giannina Braschi, Empire of Dreams, Pastoral (1988)

• And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925).

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 764-65.

• In lang, lang days o' simmer,
  When the clear and cloudless sky
  Refuses ae wee drap o' rain
  To Nature parched and dry,
  The genial night, wi' balmy breath,
  Gars verdure spring anew,
  An' ilka blade o' grass
  Keps its ain drap o' dew.
  • James Ballantine, Its Ain Drap o' Dew.

• O thou who passest through our valleys in
  Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat
  That flames from their large nostrils! Thou, O Summer,
  Oft pitchest here thy golden tent, and oft
  Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld
  With joy thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.
  • William Blake, To Summer.

• Now simmer blinks on flowery braes,
  And o'er the crystal streamlet plays.
  • Robert Burns, The Birks of Aberfeldy.

• I question not if thrushes sing,
  If roses load the air;
  Beyond my heart I need not reach
  When all is summer there.
  • John Vance Cheney, Love's World.

• The Indian Summer, the dead Summer's soul.
  • Mary Clemmer, Presence, line 62.

• Oh, father's gone to market-town, he was up before the day,
  And Jamie's after robins, and the man is making hay,
  And whistling down the hollow goes the boy that minds the mill,
  While mother from the kitchen door is calling with a will,
  "Polly!—Polly!—The cows are in the corn!
  Oh, Where's Polly?"
  • R. W. Gilder, A Midsummer Song.

• Here is the ghost
  Of a summer that lived for us,
  Here is a promise
  Of summer to be.
  • William Ernest Henley, Rhymes and Rhythms.

• All labourers draw hame at even,
  And can to others say,
  "Thanks to the gracious God of heaven,
  Whilk sent this summer day."
  • Alexander Hume, Evening, Stanza 2.

• Sumer is y cumen in.
  • Famous old Round. The music is the oldest piece of polyphonic and canonical composition in existence. This portion was written probably in 1226 by a monk, John of Fornsete, at the Abbey of Reading. Original is in Harleian Manuscript, 978.

• As a lodge in a garden of cucumbers.
  • Isaiah. I. 8.

• O for a lodge in a garden of cucumbers!
  O for an iceberg or two at control!
  O for a vale that at midday the dew cumbers!
  O for a pleasure trip up to the pole!
  • Rossiter Johnson, Ninety-Nine in the Shade.

• Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.
  • Charles Lamb, To V. Novello (May 9, 1826).

• O summer day beside the joyous sea!
  O summer day so wonderful and white,
  So full of gladness and so full of pain!
  Forever and forever shalt thou be
  To some the gravestone of a dead delight,
  To some the landmark of a new domain.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Summer Day by the Sea.

• Where'er you walk cool gales shall fan the glade,
  Trees where you sit shall crowd into a shade.
  Where'er you tread the blushing flowers shall rise,
  And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.
  • Alexander Pope, Pastorals, Summer.

• But see, the shepherds shun the noonday heat,
  The lowing herds to murmuring brooks retreat,
  To closer shades the panting flocks remove;
  Ye gods! and is there no relief for love?
  • Alexander Pope, Pastorals, Summer.

• Oh, the summer night
  Has a smile of light
  And she sits on a sapphire throne.
  • Barry W. Procter (Barry Cornwall), The Nights.

• Before green apples blush,
  Before green nuts embrown,
  Why, one day in the country
  Is worth a month in town.
  • Christina G. Rossetti, Summer.

• Heat, ma'am! it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.
  • Sydney Smith, Lady Holland's Memoir, Volume I, p. 267

Seasons

Spring · Summer · Autumn · Winter