A Northern Light

Dusk.  As we usher in the Cumbrian summer, I am finding this a wondrous and beautiful time. When summer days are long, the last vestiges of daylight stubbornly clinging, no wonder poets and writers through the ages were so inspired.  Wordsworth’s ‘To A Butterfly’, and ‘I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud' (Daffodils).  Coleridge, Southey, Tennyson, Sir Walter Scott, Beatrix Potter, and so many others who referenced or made their homes in the Lake District.  I am seeing their works brought to life and it’s more magnificent to behold than in my most earnest imaginings. 

Cumbria is resplendent in all seasons and circumstances, be it rain, mist, fog, ice, gray, green, wind, or calm.  Although the sun seems a less frequent visitor, there is nothing quite like the unveiled splendor of this region once bathed in its radiance. 

Now that it stays light well past the hour in which the sun sets in my homeland state, and now that the sun rises at hours earlier than I was previously acquainted with, I am by happenstance realizing the full effect of this northern climate, much to my delight.  If summer days could last forever, I’d surely become more than a merely seasonal or obligatory morning person.  There was a time when this Kansas gal thought the midnight sun the stuff of legends.  In the fullness of summer, Cumbria isn’t far from it. 

I look forward to more magnificent sunsets over the sea followed by a long and lovely dusk. 

The vast and solemn company of clouds
Around the Sun's death, lit, incarnadined,
Cool into ashy wan; as Night enshrouds
The level pasture, creeping up behind
Through voiceless vales, o'er lawn and purpled hill
And hazéd mead, her mystery to fulfil.
Cows low from far-off farms; the loitering wind
Sighs in the hedge, you hear it if you will,--
Tho' all the wood, alive atop with wings
Lifting and sinking through the leafy nooks,
Seethes with the clamour of a thousand rooks.
Now every sound at length is hush'd away.
These few are sacred moments. One more Day
Drops in the shadowy gulf of bygone things.

- After Sunset, by William Allingham