Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

Although the solstice has now passed, of long custom Midsummer Day is St. John's Day, and Midsummer Eve - the day for Shakespeare's play - is this evening.

Under normal circumstances, tomorrow would have a High Mass to mark it; none this year. (We live in a time not only without the strong markers of weekly cycles, but of festivals as well.) I have done my annual revisiting of Vaughan Williams's Oxford Elegy - Arnold touches on all seasons but one recalls the "high Midsummer pomps" perhaps, most of all, or at least I do. (It is now as I make it about thirty-eight years since I first heard that piece; I feel old; by coincidence, it was also thirty-eight years ago that I also first attended Solemn High Mass for the Nativity of St. John Baptist.)

The play has its points of interest - the first clearly shaped by the "green world" trope that Frye identified in the mature Shakespearean comedies. It feels, with the minimal plot, to be a thrown-off piece, a riff by an author who had just finished Romeo and Juliet, on a couple who see themselves as star-crossed but who live in a resolutely comic universe which will not cooperate with this form of self-dramatisation, crossed with the Queen Mab speech, as it were, come to life and taking over stage management of the action, followed by a parodic performance of yet another take on the same theme, the whole "giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name".

And one last poetic connection with Midsummer, this one from Housman, and entire:

From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,
      The shires have seen it plain,
From north and south the sign returns
      And beacons burn again.


Look left, look right, the hills are bright,
      The dales are light between,
Because 'tis fifty years to-night
      That God has saved the Queen.


Now, when the flame they watch not towers
      About the soil they trod,
Lads, we'll remember friends of ours
      Who shared the work with God.


To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
      To fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home to-night:
      Themselves they could not save.


It dawns in Asia, tombstones show
      And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
      Beside the Severn's dead.


We pledge in peace by farm and town
      The Queen they served in war,
And fire the beacons up and down
      The land they perished for.


"God save the Queen" we living sing,
      From height to height 'tis heard;
And with the rest your voices ring,
      Lads of the Fifty-third.


Oh, God will save her, fear you not:
      Be you the men you've been,
Get you the sons your fathers got,
      And God will save the Queen.