freethoughtandmetaphor

There’s lots of variety to the weather in Maine.  Not usually tornadoes, which we have escaped coming across the country.  It’s also not usually sunny and warm when we arrive about the first of June.  This year it was.  We know it had been raining, because the stream is running strong. (No, you can’t see the motion in a photograph.)

And we know it has been a cold spring, because the lilacs are in their glory.  Most years they are past or fading when we arrive.

So many lilacs that the poem by Alfred Noyes starts running through my mind:

Go down to Kew in lilac time, in lilac time, in lilac time
Go down to Kew in lilac time.  It isn’t far from London.
And you shall wander hand in hand . . .

It’s from Noyes’s most quoted poem, “The Barrel Organ.”  I remember more fondly “The Highway Man” who came riding, riding, “When the moon is a ghostly galleon.”  Neither is great poetry, yet they’ve lasted.  They stick in the brain.  I’ve never been to Kew, and as I look at the moon I sometimes wonder which shape Noyes thought looked like a galleon, but how the words stick!