Neverending Summer: Literary Descriptions of Summer

Here in Brooklyn we’re not quite ready to say goodbye to summer yet. However, with school just around the corner, we might have to admit that autumn (and winter) are closer than we’d like. To try to keep the summer vibes going, we asked the Brooklyn Public Library staff to submit their favorite descriptions of summer from literature. Have a few favorites of your own? Let us know in the comments!

From "August" by Bruno Schulz, translated by John Curran Davis:

“Through a dark apartment on the first floor of a tenement on the market square, every day of that whole great summer, there passed: the silence of shimmering veins of air, squares of radiance dreaming their fervid dreams on the floor, a barrel organ melody struck from the day’s deepest golden vein, and two or three measures of a refrain being played on a grand piano somewhere, over and over, swooning in the sunshine on the white pavements, lost in the fire of the fullness of the day. Adela, her housework done, drew down the linen blinds, threw a shadow over the rooms. The colours then fell an octave lower; the parlour filled up with darkness as if plunged into the luminosity of the deep sea, still murkily reflected in mirrors of green, whilst all the blazing heat of the day breathed on the blinds, swaying gently to the reveries of the midday hour.” 

From The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury:

“One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.

And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer's ancient green lawns.

Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.

Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.

The rocket lay on the launching field, blowing out pink clouds of fire and oven heat. The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land....” 

From Richard Ford's Independence Day:

“Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home - when your personal clouds don't move but hang - can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.” 

From J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

"The castle grounds were gleaming in the sunlight as though freshly painted; the cloudless sky smiled at itself in the smoothly sparkling lake, the satin-green lawns rippled occasionally in a gentle breeze: June had arrived."

Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart:

"Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. For those few months, you're not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don't have the rest of the year. You can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. Summer just opens the door and lets you out."

From Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline:

“Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.”

From Benjamin Alire Sáenz's Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe:

"Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.”

From Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You:

“New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.” 

From Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson:

“In the deep heat of summer, we watched as kids circled around the herorin addicts, taking bets on whether or not they’d fall over” 

From A Death in the Family by James Agee:

“…supper was at six and was over by half past. There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell; and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were startled, and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs were flopping in the dewy grass, by the time the fathers and the children came out…” 

From Act III/Scene I in Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeares:

Benvolio:  I pray thee, good Mercutio, let’s retire:   
The day is hot, the Capulets abroad,      
And, if we meet, we shall not ’scape a brawl;
For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.          

Mercutio: Thou art like one of those fellows that when he enters the confines of a tavern claps me his sword upon the table and says, ‘God send me no need of thee!’ and by the operation of the second cup draws him on the drawer, when, indeed, there is no need.              

Benvolio: Am I like such a fellow?   

Mercutio:  Come, come, thou art as hot a Jack in thy mood as any in Italy; and as soon moved to be moody, and as soon moody to be moved.

From The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers:

“In June the trees were bright dizzy green, but later the leaves darkened, and the town turned black and shrunken under the glare of the sun. At first Frankie walked around doing one thing and another. The sidewalks of the town were gray in the early morning and at night, but the noon sun put a glaze on them, so that the cement burned and glittered like glass. The sidewalks finally became too hot for Frankie’s feet, and also she got herself in trouble. She was in so much secret trouble that she thought it was better to stay at home—and at home there was only Berenice Sadie Brown and John Henry West. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, saying the same things over and over, so that by August the words began to rhyme with each other and sound strange. The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer. At last the summer was like a green sick dream, or like a silent crazy jungle under glass.” 

From Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt:

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.” 

From The Use of Life by John Lubbock

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” 

From “Sonnet XL” by Pablo Neruda

“Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.” 

From John Cheever's The Swimmer

""Summer has filled her veins with light and her heart is washed with noon." "It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, "I drank too much last night."

From Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

"So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.

From Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation 

“It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey”

After throwing out all of her possessions save a mattress on the floor, and sleeping through the winter, she reemerges during the swampy heat of a Manhattan summer and begins to heal. And it’s precisely in the minutiae of summer that her change happens: the freedom of wearing cheap cotton shorts in public, jogging down concrete blocks with no sense of time, sitting on a park bench doing nothing, the small joy of buying fresh flowers. The book is a call to all citydwellers (but especially women) to strip down to the essentials as a way of reclaiming your identity and rejecting societal pressure. When that feeling creeps up that summer will never end, I remind myself that metamorphosis can happen in the summer, too:

“There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now.” 

From H. D (Hilda Doolittle)'s "Heat":

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air—
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat—
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.