‘And your English summer’s done’

OUT in the fields, the post-harvest hush and that sense of summer ending. On a strand of sagging barbed wire, a single yellowhammer drones: ‘A little bit of bread and no cheese. A little bit of bread and no cheese.’ Everywhere, that incipient melancholy of August, which Kipling noted in The Long Trail:

There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,

And the ricks stand grey to the sun,

Singing: ‘Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,

And your English summer’s done.

Everywhere except