The Book of Han, Li Lezhi, and Zhu Ming has a record: "Zhu Ming flourished and grew, and he applied to all things." Summer is like an engine that stimulates the growth of all things and paints a beautiful picture for the world. In the lotus pond, "In June, the fragrance of lotus flowers fills the lake, and the red and green fans reflect the waves." The Mulan boat is like a flower girl, and there are many love children in the lotus house. In the field, "the plums are golden and apricots are fattened, and the wheat blossoms are white and the cauliflower is thin." The sun-long hedge fell without anyone, but the dragonflies and butterflies flew. "In the courtyard," the green trees shade the summer long, the terrace reflected into the pond. The crystal curtains are blowing in the breeze, and the shelves are full of roses and a courtyard of incense. At this time of year, everything is so harmonious that people feel as if they are on the banks of Du Fu's "Jiangcun", looking at the "Qingjiang River and hugging the village stream", and sighing "Everything in ChangxiaJiang Village".
In these lines of poetry, summer relies on its own tranquility and elegance, becoming an important part of classical Chinese literary writing, carrying the poet's diverse emotions. And what is the summer scene in English literature? What kind of state of mind does it imply to the poet? We may wish to follow a few of the writers below to experience how summer as a literary theme or a literary image can be integrated into English literary works, and promote the expression of the theme of the work and the expression of the author's emotions.
Shakespeare's Summer
When it comes to summer imagery in English literature, many readers may first think of the eighteenth sonnet written by the English literary hero William Shakespeare. Of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, this love poem is perhaps the most well-known. It was first published in 1609, but it is widely believed by academics that it was written in the 1590s. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker "I" asks an unknown listener, "You": "Should I compare you to summer?" Academics have been divided into the identity of this listener, and no consensus has ever been reached. But no matter who the hypothetical listener really is, we can still perceive that in the eyes of the speaker, Summer has lost in this contest, and in comparison with Summer, the listener "you" is obviously "more lovely and gentle", and "Summer" is always so "short". In the eyes of the speaker, "summer" becomes a foil to highlight the beautiful face of the person he admires, and the poem expresses the speaker's love for the person he loves. Needless to say, summer in the UK is beautiful. Shakespeare has no intention of denying this, either, but his focus seems to point more to the brevity of summer. As Shakespeare wrote in his poem, "The fierce wind of May shakes the buds." The summer wind blows the buds waiting to be released to the left and right, as if to remind everyone that the time of youth cannot be eternal, and if you do not pay attention, it will be fleeting, just like all "Fangyan", it is difficult to escape the "chance" and "impermanent heavenly path".
At the time of writing this poem, Shakespeare was almost 30 years old, in the youth of his life, rich and powerful, and with a heart. According to his division of life in "Everyone Is Happy", a person's life can be divided into seven stages: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, judge, old man, and "second childhood" that requires the care of others. For Shakespeare, he had bid farewell to the first two stages and became a husband, father of three children, and a well-known playwright. If life can be divided into four seasons, we can also think that at that time, he had bid farewell to the spring of his life and entered the summer of his life, full of vitality and inspiration for artistic creation, and did his best to show his ambitions.
For Shakespeare, summer represented the best of life. As the speaker in the poem says in praise of the peerless appearance of his beloved, "Your eternal summer will not fade, your beauty will not be lost, and death will not boast of it, because you have not paced in his shadow."
In this description, Shakespeare's attitude toward summer seems to contradict itself. On the one hand, he mentioned "you" in previous poems that "you" are clearly "more lovely and gentle" than the "short" "summer". On the other hand, in the poems here, the "summer" that represents the youthful beauty and the worldly beauty of "you" is "eternal". The inconsistency between these two statements also seems to imply that the only constant theorem in the world may be change. The seasons change, Vientiane renews, and even the meaning of "summer" differs in a short sonnet. However, Shakespeare seems to have spoken of this inconsistent reason in subsequent lines of poetry. The reason why the object of the speaker's admiration can stay young and have his own "eternal summer" is that he "lives in the immortal poetry line, not disturbed by time." "As long as man is not extinct and blind, as long as the poem exists, it can give you life." In the eyes of the speaker, only the law of inhibition can always maintain the beauty of the lover, so that it will remain forever in the summer of life.
Fitzgerald's summer
The Great Gatsby is one of the representative works of american writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and Summer is the backdrop to the entire story. From the narrative perspective of the novel character Nick, "The Great Gatsby" tells a story of love and betrayal, glitz and restlessness, and loneliness and disillusionment. At the beginning of this story about Gatsby, Nick watches "in the sunlight, many new green leaves on the tree sprout and grow, as fast as fast as a fast shot played in a movie", which gives him "a familiar idea that life will start again with the summer coming". Nick's feelings about summer point to the "rebirth" of summer, and it seems that all the past can usher in a new beginning in summer. This is also the idea of the protagonist of the novel, Gatsby.
Years ago, the young Gatsby had not yet made his fortune, but when he met Daisy, he fell in love at first sight. Shy, Gatsby reluctantly gave up the relationship and disappeared from Daisy's life. After amassing a fortune through the sale of bootleggers, he returned to New York City and held frequent parties in the hope that Daisy would renew her love and fall in love with him. However, due to class prejudices, Daisy eventually chooses to stay with her husband Tom, does not accept Gatsby's love, and eventually indirectly leads to the tragic ending of the protagonist. Thus, that summer did not bring Gatsby the "rebirth" he wanted. On the contrary, it not only woke up Gatsby to a final dream, but also brought his life to an end.
In addition, throughout the plot development of the story, summer as an important background, from the sweltering train from the countryside to the city to the dust on the road, creating a noisy and restless atmosphere all the time. Even on the shores of Long Island Bay, where summer breezes and white sand are breezy, this noise and restlessness can be traced. Throughout the summer, guests are like summer fireflies, going in and out of Gatsby's estate on Long Island Bay, through gardens, porches and ballrooms, singing and dancing to the aid of champagne and music. On countless nights, the summer night sky has witnessed the indulgent revelry and laughter and scolding that took place in Gatsby Manor, witnessing the hypocrisy and emptiness and confusion in it.
In that "hustle and bustle of the 20s," people did everything they could to accumulate wealth and hoped to join the upper class. In that "jazz age", after harvesting the primitive accumulation of capital, people pursued material enjoyment, sound and color, lost their belief norms and moral hearts, and immersed themselves in the cheerful "sound of silence".
It is in this context that the "confused" Fitzgerald embellishes the novel's summer sky with hints of disillusionment with the "American Dream." In the story, if we compare the twinkling stars on summer nights to moral values in the American cultural tradition, and the banquet at Gatsby Manor as a consumer hedonistic value that implies the pursuit of material pleasures, then the two were already separated and completely separated. This metaphor for the separation of heaven and earth also hints at the author's reflections on American society at that time, especially the dilemmas and flaws faced by the so-called "American Dream". And all this reflection is quietly written by the author into the narrator Nick's memories of that summer.
Faulkner's summer
Like Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, another famous American writer of the same period, places summer in the big context of the story. The August Light is another novel written by Faulkner after the publication of The Hustle and the Commotion and My Dying Hour, and is an important part of the "Joknapatafa Lineage" created by the author. Published in 1932, the novel is set in American Southern society and creates vivid characters such as Joe Crispus and Lena Grove through two storyline lines, exploring topics such as race, class, love, human nature, and traditional cultural ideas.
The story in the novel takes place in mid-August for just over a dozen days, retracing three generations through the encounters of pregnant grove and 33-year-old mixed-race Christians in the town of Jefferson. In that hot August, Christmus, a mixed-race child who had been treated unjustly since childhood, committed murder in despair and anger; Grove, who was already pregnant and about to be in the making, was unable to find his lover in Jefferson. It was also in the August daylight that Chrismus realized the meaning and purpose of life, voluntarily surrendered and accepted lynching punishment after absconding for a week; On the same day, Grove gave birth to his own child, and after discovering the true face of his lover, he chose to start his journey again, leaving Jefferson Town.
Needless to say, the epiphanies of both protagonists in the novel are closely related to the light of summer, especially August.
In 1957, when Faulkner was lecturing at the University of Virginia, an audience member asked what the August Light meant in the novel, and Faulkner replied: "In mid-August, there are days in mid-August when there are sudden signs of autumn: the weather is cool, and the sky is filled with soft and transparent light, as if it came not from the day but from the ancient past, and there may even be agricultural gods, forest gods, and other gods from Greece, from somewhere in Mount Olympus... That's what that title means. To me, it is a pleasant and evocative title, because it reminds me of that time and appreciates that than ours... Civilizations are more ancient in transparent luster. For Faulkner, in the summer, the beam of light sprinkled from the sky is no longer a simple Tyndal effect, it contains profound life wisdom, inspires the minds of people on the earth, makes them feel relieved and enlightened in the adversity and misery of life, have a new understanding and understanding of themselves and life, let go of past obsessions, and start a new journey of life. And this process also adds a new meaning to summer.
Arie Smith's Summer
Will summer be the end of the four seasons?
Many people may never have thought about it, and some of them may ask rhetorically, shouldn't the end of the four seasons be winter? Such an understanding of the four seasons is clearly based on the concept of "year". Twelve months of the year, starting with winter and ending with winter, wraps around the three seasons of spring, summer and autumn like swaddling. But this view seems to ignore an important premise, namely that the four seasons are formed much earlier than the artificially created calendar concept of "year". With the change of day and night, the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter are also constantly rotating, forming a cycle. If so, then why can't summer be an "endpoint" in the cycle of the four seasons?
For this, the British contemporary female writer Ali Smith also put forward her own views in her work "Summer". Smith's Summer, published in August 2020, is the finale of his "Quartet of Seasons" novel series. The first three works in the series are "Autumn", "Winter" and "Spring", which were published in 2016, 2017 and 2019 respectively. With the advent of "Summer", the "Four Seasons Quartet" series has also been painted with a perfect terminator. Although the publication of "Xia" marks the end of the "Four Seasons Quartet" series at the creative level, at the content level, "Xia" does not announce the end of this four-season cycle. In 2016, Smith's "Quartet of Four Seasons" opened in the decadence and confusion of "Autumn", integrating many hot topics in current British society into the text with a witty and humorous tone, and with the help of the author's superb writing skills and profound literary heritage, the discussion of hot events in current British society was mixed with British classic literary works, creating a literary space that is compatible with past and present, illusion and reality. In this literary space constructed by author Smith, "Autumn" also works together with the three subsequent works to textualize the current social reality and hot spots, transforming social topics such as Brexit, online classes, and rushing toilet paper into new elements in the development of British literature.
In The Quartet of Seasons, if Autumn raises a question at the beginning about where the UK will go after leaving the European Union, the reader doesn't seem to have a Smith's answer in Summer, and there may not be a definitive answer to that question. In 2020, when the world pattern is changing and the public health crisis is raging around the world, the normal life order of all mankind has been affected and challenged to varying degrees. In this macro context, the UK's withdrawal from the EU is a bit trivial and is no longer the top priority for the UK and eu countries. As Smith says in the book, borrowing Charlotte, "All that is about Brexit is irrelevant now." As a result of "the constant change of the world order," the questions Smith threw out five years ago also became unresolved and did not usher in its end.
People usually look forward to the end of a story from the very beginning, which is what the famous 20th-century literary critic Frank Komode called the "sense of end". In his book The Meaning of Ending, Komoder argues that novels of all kinds attempt to explore the question of end in different ways, and that the mode of action they move towards end is the model that our own lives follow, bringing meaning to our lives. This trait can be found in the works of many 20th-century writers. In the case of Virginia Woolf, she argues that life "is not a series of symmetrically arranged carriage lights", but "a halo of light" or "a translucent envelope that surrounds our consciousness from beginning to end". Woolf emphasized the uncertainty of life, rejecting the narrative tradition of realistic fiction like the "carriage lamp", arguing that the development of events could not reach a satisfactory narrative ending at the end. This seems to be the message that Allie Smith is trying to convey in Summer: While summer can be the end of a four-season cycle, the emotions, memories, fantasies, lives, and meanings it carries will not end, and will continue.
Summer is never absent, and its interaction with literature will go on forever. As the American writer Harper Lee wrote in To Kill a Mockingbird, "Summer is our best season." It brings us the warmest weather of the year, the most brilliant sunshine and the most lush natural scenery. In the view of another American writer, Henry James, "Summer afternoons— summer afternoons, for me, have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." In the eyes of the English poet Wallace Stevens, "a summer night is like a perfect idea." The British writer Evelyn Waugh apparently also agrees with the comfort and richness that summer brings to people's lives, and in his "After the Storm in the Old Garden" expects that "it can always be so - always summer". Although the four seasons rotate, summer to autumn, and the beautiful summer will eventually be briefly separated from people for a period of time, it is also as the contemporary American novelist Jonathan Safran Fore wrote in his experimental novel "The Tree of Code": "Although August has passed, summer has forcibly continued its time." They sprout secretly in the chapters of the old age, hidden between its pages. When the reader opens the book and touches the page, it seems that he can still feel the summer temperature, hear the loud cicadas, and think of the shade that swayed in the breeze.