The Lone Swallows: A Mid-Summer By Henry Williamson

A flowery description of the day and night in nature outside a village in Mid-Summer. You'll be lulled to sleep with a story that gets slower as it goes on. Sounds include birds chirping, bugs, grass in the breeze, ocean waves, and children singing.

Transcript

This is Aurora with chapters from The Lone Swallows by Henry Williamson.

So get comfortable and let yourself drift off with this story.

A brimstone butterfly drifted with the wind over the waving grasses and settled on the shallow cup of a tall flower,

John go to bed at noon.

The bright flowers were closing for the sun was high.

It paused for an instant only and then fluttered over the hedge and was gone.

From a common white butterfly,

A weed of the air hated by the countrymen,

Yet part of summer's heart as it flickered like a stray snowflake in the sunshine,

Passing the world spires of red-green sorrel and glazed petals of buttercup,

Living its brief hour among the scents and colors of summer.

Vibrating their sun-crisped wings with shrill hum,

The flies shot past.

The wild,

Humble bees sang to themselves as in a frenzy of labor,

For they took the pollen from the roses in the hedge.

The cuckoos sent call after call of melody from the distant hazel coppice.

The sound of summer was everywhere.

The earth filled with swelling ecstasy,

Everything so green and alive.

The waving grasses and the hawthorns.

The green kingdom charged and surcharged with energy,

From the wild strawberry to the mighty sap-surfited bowl of the oak.

Although so still,

The vast earth was humming and vibrating.

The crescendo of passion reached gradually while the sun swept nearer,

Day by day,

The zenith of its curve.

In one corner of the meadow was a small pond,

Half hidden by rushes,

Bearing a golden blazon of flower.

In autumn,

The countrypeople would grind the roasted seeds of the iris to make their poor man's coffee.

With them grew the bog asphodel,

Crowned by a tapering spike of star-like flowers,

Also yellow the color of happiness.

Hidden securely among the rushes,

The moorhen had her nest of dried waterweed,

A platform on which at night rested her children.

Little black balls of fluff with a red beak.

A faint chirping came from the flags,

A splash,

And silence.

The mother had heard my slow approach and called her young to remain still.

Something with a thin,

Stick-like,

Enameled blue and fanned by a whirling crystal of light alighted on the open white petals of a crow's foot,

The water buttercup.

The dragonfly folded its gauzy wings and contemplated the still deeps from which,

A few hours before,

It had crept.

Like the civilized bees that leave the security of stored caves of honey to the new race,

So all the wild things live,

But to secure the future of their species.

Everything strives for the beautiful,

The ideal,

Without conscious effort maybe,

But the ideal is there,

All for the species.

The nightingale that silvers the dusk with song has finer notes than his ancestor of olden time.

He has learned so much during the centuries.

Through generations of faithful loyalty to an ideal,

His tiny soul flame has become brighter and his voice speaks with sweeter poetry.

On the may trees in the hedge,

Already shaking their blossoms into the wind,

The wild roses were open to the sky.

It was now their brief hour of sunshine,

Simple petals stained with rosy hue.

They watched for the wild bee to bring the pollen that would change the beauty into life.

High sang the larks over the meadow,

Striving with fluttering wings to reach the blue vision of heaven.

Their voices trailed to the earth and filled the heart with hope and joy.

Afar,

The noisy rooks fed their young in the colony in the elm tops.

At hand,

On the ground,

Golden buttercup and white moon daisy,

Lemon-colored hawkweed,

An obstinate charlock,

Beloved of the visiting bee for its great dowry of honey.

The sunbeams had flooded the cold earth during the spring tide of the year,

And now the earth had sent its flowers and its grasses with their faces turned above.

Everything loved the moving meadow.

By the stream,

The blackbird sought for food.

The finches came to sip.

The hoverflies fanned above the king cups.

Scarlet soldierflies and little plain moths clung to Bennett bloom.

The wind sighed in the grasses as it shook the dust pollen from the heads.

The meadow grasses were timorous of the breeze and trembled at its coming.

Over the water meadow,

The lapwings wheeled and spun.

The lapwing holds the secret of the swamps and boglands,

And you hear it in his wild voice as his wings soar above.

Climbing high and diving to the ground as though it were sweet ecstasy to fall,

Wing crumpled and broken-hearted before his mate.

Against the deep blue of the sky,

A little money spider was taking a line from one veined ash leaf to another,

Although so small he was easily seen in the waning light,

A dark speck moving with great care.

It was evening time,

And the hymn of warblers and thrushes,

Pipets and blackbirds was all but sung.

Throughout the day,

The great vibrant waves of sunlight were plangent on the cornfields and rushing with golden swell over the bee-visited hedgerows and green meadows,

Vitalizing the slender grasses and red sorrel growing in beauty with branched buttercups and incarnadine poppy flowers.

Slowly the daytide of summer's light and glory ebbed.

The sun swung down from heaven and dipped its rim into the ocean.

The fields and distant oak wood were laved in yellow light.

And like a golden sand,

Gleaming in the western sunlight as the sea recedes,

The ebbing tide of sunlight left its pools among the woods and the hedges.

Far away some children were singing as they went slowly homewards through the closed buttercups and daisies,

And their careless cries were in harmony with the evening.

I sat on a gate and watched the rooks flying over the elm trees in the village below,

Where all was peace and quiet.

The wind sighed through the hedge.

A dead leaf moved listlessly,

Twirling as the wind spun it.

The wind had been mild,

And the invisible hand,

Composing and decomposing,

Had not yet touched the filigree web of its brittle frame.

On its parent ash tree,

It hung and quivered,

Never more to respond to the fire of summer.

Gradually the children reached their homes,

And no more cries came from the meadow.

The little spider paused halfway between the leaves and hung quiescent.

Perhaps some flaw in his architectural scheme was apparent to him,

Or he feared that the wind of the summer night would destroy his foundation threads.

And only a few weeks before,

Without tuition or practice,

He knew the angles of his pillars,

The proportions of his stanchions,

The symmetry and balance of his walls.

He had watched no honey-colored parent at work,

Yet within his minute brain were the plans of a perfect system to entangle the smallest flying insects that would fall against his web.

The pools of gold about the oaks slowly drained away,

And the sky above became a more profound blue.

Three swifts passed above,

Wheeling in final flight before creeping to their nests under the tiles of the church.

The songs of the warblers and thrushes as the light drains away find an echo in the heart of the poet,

For they sing of the beauty of summer.

The swift's cries belong to the spectral light of the stars and the mystery of infinite space.

The swift is the mystic among birds.

The spider moved on as the first star shone in the sky.

Maybe his problem was solved,

Or that he had waited for the beauteous whiteness of Lyra's way.

Slowly he traveled to the leaf he had chosen as a base,

Paused a while,

And crept back across his lifeline.

The rooks were settled in the elm tops by the church,

And their ca-ca's came less often.

The prospects of the next day's forage among the new potatoes had been discussed thoroughly and were known to all.

In satisfaction,

The colony had settled down to sleep.

Gradually,

The sun sank into the sea,

Its fire spreading its broad glow through the cloud strata over the far horizon.

One by one,

The stars crept into their places,

Waiting for the queen moon to lift her head above the hills.

Antares,

Shone in the south,

Above were Lyra,

Achela,

Northern Crown,

And all the heavenly concourse.

Mars glowed red,

With Spika Virginia swung low in adoration,

And sending its wan green fires to the watcher.

Slowly the afterglow drenched in the gray waters.

An owl quavered in loneliness as it fanned over the churchyard.

A jackdaw answered sharply,

Querulously,

And night had come to the earth.

A pale golden vapor over the hills,

And the moon rose like the head of a yellow moth creeping from its case.

It swam into view over the dark hills,

And I looked into its face while it shrank into a silver disk.

The sky became lavender colored.

The moon dust falling with the dew and forming a gauzy veil above.

The boom of the waves pounding the distant headland was borne on the wind,

Burdened with foam fragrance and the scent of the sweet clover fields beyond the village.

It stirred the green corn,

Came fitfully,

Then sighed to silence.

The last laborer left the inn and the village slept.

The walls of the cottages gleamed white under the dark thatch as the moonlight fell directly upon them.

I was alone with the sapling wheat and all was still.

I was alone with the wheat that I loved.

Riding over the field my feet were drenched in an instant by the dew.

Lying at full length on the earth,

I pressed my face among the sweet wistfulness of stalks,

Stained and glowing as with some lambent fire,

Pale,

Mysterious.

On each pale flame blade depended a small white light,

A dew drop in which the light of the moon was imprisoned.

Each flag of wheat held the beauty of pure water and within the sappy blades glowed the spirit of the earth.

In the spectral silence,

A voice spoke of its ancient lineage.

Spring after spring,

Each with its glory of blue winged swallows speeding,

Wheeling,

Falling through the azure,

The cuckoo calling in the meadows and the lark song shaking its silver earth chain as it strove to be free.

Sitting there on the cool couch of the silver-flotten corn with the soft earth under me,

Sweet with its scent of stored sunbeams,

The beauty of the phantom wheat carried me away in a passion of sweet ecstasy.

White as the sea murmur within the shell,

The voice of the corn came to the inward ear.

Ever the same was the earth that it knew,

The east washed with faint rose water in the day spring.

The lark flight loosened upon the bosom of the dawn wind and the golden beams of the sun brusting the hills of the morning.

The moon floated in the night pool with the swan,

The distant roar of the surf floated from over the clover fields.

I lay there,

One with the maker of life.

A white mistiness flapped in front,

Beating broad pinions as it hovered.

It dropped to the earth,

Fluttering like a moth,

The ghostly barn owl hovered,

Looking for its meal.

Extremely the owl fanned the night with his broad wings and then floated away to his nest in the loft of the cottage near the church.

I walked towards the village while a land rail began his jarring craic-craic in the corn,

And little moths went down to drink the honey of the night-opening flowers,

Living their short life while the moon,

Soon to die,

Was in its fullest beauty.

I walked towards the village while a land rail began his jarring craic-craic in the corn,

And little moths went down to drink the honey of the night-opening flowers,

Living their short life while the moon,

Soon to die,

Was in its fullest beauty.

I walked towards the village while a land rail began his jarring craic-craic in the corn,

And little moths went down to drink the honey of the night-opening flowers,

Living their short life while the moon,

Soon to die,

Was in its fullest beauty.

I walked towards the village while a land rail began his jarring craic-craic in the corn,

And little moths went down to drink the honey of the night-opening flowers,

Living their short life while the moon,

Soon to die,

Was in its fullest beauty.

I walked towards the village while a land rail began his jarring craic-craic in the corn,

And little moths went down to drink the honey of the night-opening flowers,

Living

Reviews

I love all the nature stories you’ve chosen, thank you—🙏🏼❤️