We have just passed the longest day – the summer solstice, when, as the Latin root tells us, the sun (sol), stands still in the heavens. At least it seems to do so, which is why the ancients celebrated June 21st as the high point of the year.
    
Of course, the sun doesn’t really stand still, but our ancestors were more comfortable than we are with metaphor and poetic truth, We assume that we are just more science-savvy, but most of us have never observed the heavens in the way that most of our ancestors did for most of the time, when planting their crops or planning their journeys. Sound practical knowledge took as kin the mysterious world of gods and goddesses, little people, strange powers, and the revealed truth of dreams. Fairy tales and folk tales often involve our hero snoozing in the midday sun or the dangerous moonlight, or finding himself as Parsifal does at a particular place at a particular time, when the sun strikes a rock to open a door long awaited from a dream.
  
When Newton made the movement of the heavens mechanical, much was lost. The spectacular success of the Age of Enlightenment and all that has followed, has consigned mythos – poetic truth, to the dust and ashes at the back of the hearth, as the very poor relation of logos – rational truth.
  
But is it really so? I am convinced that the runaway train of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the da Vinci Code, are part of our hard-wired longing for the magical, the mythic, and the mysterious. When denied a legitimate outlet, this longing either mutates into cultish extremism, or latches onto anything that seems suitable, however outlandish – like The X-files, The X-Men, and Mr Dan Brown.
  
In fact, we just need the poetry and the myth back in our everyday lives, and art can provide that.
  
Everybody loves Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in parks across the land it is being performed right now. Shakespeare, as usual, was onto something with his crazy tale of love-potions and sprites, mistaken identities and talking walls, donkey-headed sex objects, and amorous fairies. Rational it is not, marvellous, it is, and by taking us right outside of the world of the known into the unquantifiable world of the unknown, Shakespeare can ask difficult questions about the nature of attraction, and remind us that whatever we do, maverick and wayward forces play more of a part in our choices than we like to think.
  
Tippet’s opera, The Midsummer Marriage, and Britten’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (on stage this summer at Glyndebourne), both focus on the mysterious drama of a solstice marriage. Pagan societies chose the solstice for their unions – the goddess was at the height of her powers, and would confer light and warmth on those who came to her on that day. Fascinatingly, our cliché of the honeymoon, long since stripped of its solstice associations, is the moon in June, the moon under which our ancestors celebrated their unions by drinking mead, made from fermented honey.
  
Doris Day seems to have got this right in her 1953 movie, By the Light of the Silvery Moon – and if you want to sing along, just Google the title, and up comes the tune… Honey Moon, we’ll be shining in June/ Your silvery beams will bring love’s dreams/ We’ll be cuddling soon… and so on.
  
I know it’s not great literature, but it does borrow a bit of great literature; Sappho was the person to call the moon ‘silver.’
  
It’s not likely that we will ever be in touch with the rhythms of life again in the way that we were once, but poetry does put us in touch with both our inner rhythms, and rhythms different to the insistent beat of the humdrum world.
  
Midsummer was a moment of celebration and a poignant moment of reflection; soon the days would grow shorter and darker, but as Tennyson put it, ‘tho’ much is taken, much abides.’
  
The poetry of the solstice is in part its wild intensity – our ancestors lit bonfires to aid the already burning sun. The recklessness here is not the later careful storage of the harvest festival, but an abandonment to pleasure and the passing moment, just for its own sake. Poetry, whatever else it is, is a moment caught just for its own sake.
  
Think of Marvell, To his Coy Mistress, For tho’ we cannot make our sun/ stand still, yet we can make him run.

June 24, 2006.