Areopagus Volume XLIX

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the forty ninth volume of the Areopagus. June is upon us, and so it is to the first three stanzas of June Thunder, written by the Irish poet Louis MacNeice, that we award our introduction:

The Junes were free and full, driving through tiny
Roads, the mudguards brushing the cowparsley,
Through fields of mustard and under boldly embattled
Mays and chestnuts
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Or between beeches verdurous and voluptuous
Or where broom and gorse beflagged the chalkland--
All the flare and gusto of the unenduring
Joys of a season
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Now returned but I note as more appropriate
To the maturer mood impending thunder
With an indigo sky and the garden hushed except for
The treetops moving.

MacNeice takes us from recollections of golden and idyllic summers in youth to the gathering thunder of the current moment. How tempting it is to conclude that the past was inevitably better than present! Let us beware this temptation, then, and as we embark upon the stormy seas of culture together try to discern the g…