I RECENTLY heard a brief interview with a farmer on the Radio 4 programme PM about the effect of the drought on his cattle farm: the failure of the grass this year, and the difficulty of obtaining hay and silage. But this was far more than just complaining about the weather. This is what he said: “I don’t believe we do have seasons any more. It’s very much either wet or dry. We never had a spring, and we haven’t had a spring for a couple of years now.”
Later, when he was asked whether he believed in climate change, he said that he didn’t just believe in it, but was living with it now, and any doubters should come down to his farm and see it for themselves. He had already begun to cull some of his Highland cattle because he could not feed them, and had started a crowdfund to save the rest.
We have all seen the strange alterations in the past few years: primroses out at Christmas, leaves and fruit falling dry and unripe in August.
Around this time of year, I often re-read Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”, with its rich evocation of mellow ripeness, as autumn comes
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells. . .
But the apple tree that bends over my writing hut has dropped half its fruit prematurely, and the dull thud on the roof as I write speaks not of that gorgeous “ripeness to the core”, that swelling and plumping, but, rather, of unseasonal loss.
It was not Keats who came to my mind, however, as that farmer spoke, but those strangely prescient lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mock’ry, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
One might, of course, say that this is simply evidence that there have always been unseasonal seasons, uncanny weather, and complaining farmers — if it happened in the 16th century, it can hardly be climate change. Except that, in this passage, it is not a farmer, but an elemental being, Titania, a spirit of nature herself, who is speaking, and she says that it is “thorough our distemperature” that all this comes: through a deep unsettling of the natural order, an unsettling that is figured, in the play, as the quarrel between Oberon and Titania; so she goes on to say:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
It is in this play that Shakespeare suggests a prophetic and discerning part for the imagination to play: “Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason every comprehends.” (my italics).
I felt that the farmer on PM was beginning to comprehend what Shakespeare’s poetry once apprehended from afar.
The Revd Dr Malcolm Guite is keynote speaker at “Finding Inspiration in the Psalms”, on 2 October in York. Visit here for more details and tickets.
