Summer

Summer is the season through which the poem registers a decisive contrast between the original abundance of Creation and the unstable climate of the fallen world. In Eden, its warmth belongs to an “Eternal Spring,” a condition in which natural fertility, pleasure, and harmony seem permanently joined. After human disobedience, however, summer becomes one element in a larger system of seasonal change, heat, storms, disease, and mortality. Its significance therefore lies not merely in its temperature but in its position between blessing and affliction: the same solar power that nourishes life can become excessive, punitive, and dangerous.

Summer in Eden

Summer’s defining qualities are already present in the garden’s atmosphere. Eden is filled with pure air, gentle winds, native perfumes, flowering plants, fruit, shaded groves, streams, lakes, and lawns where flocks graze. The air inspires “Vernal delight and joy,” while the landscape’s profusion makes the garden appear a heaven upon Earth. Summer is not isolated as a limited interval here; its warmth and fecundity are absorbed into a perpetually renewed natural order. The garden’s seasonal ideal is explicitly figured as “Universal PAN” dancing with the Graces and the Hours while leading on “th’ Eternal Spring.” This image makes Summer part of an unbroken cycle of beauty rather than a temporary escape from cold or barrenness. Flowers grow without thorns, vines spread luxuriantly, and fruit hangs in abundance, so that climate, landscape, and emotional delight reinforce one another. Summer thus names a world in which nature’s generosity requires no defensive labor and produces no immediate threat.

Heavenly Order and Seasonal Change

The celestial order initially includes no necessity for destructive seasonal extremes. The angels move and feast in Heaven amid song, dance, celestial food, nectar, and the Trees of Life. Their evening and morning bring “change delectable, not need,” indicating that variation can exist as pleasure rather than deprivation. Against this background, the later regulation of summer marks a substantial alteration in the relation between cosmic motion and earthly life. After the Fall, God assigns the celestial powers new tasks. The Sun is instructed to move and shine in a manner capable of producing “cold and heat Scarce tollerable”; from the north comes decrepit winter, while from the south comes the heat of solstitial summer. Summer is therefore introduced as part of a changed planetary regime, not as an independent natural accident. The heavens are redirected so that their motions correspond to the damaged condition of Earth. The poem also explains the astronomical rationale for this change. Had the Sun remained in its former course, spring would have smiled perpetually over Earth, with nearly equal days and nights except near the polar regions. The altered course through the zodiac creates the changing seasons and prevents a uniformly temperate world. Summer consequently belongs to the postlapsarian structure of time: it is one of the conditions that make the inhabited world possible after the Fall, but it arrives together with climatic inequality and exposure to extremes.

Heat as a Postlapsarian Force

The new summer heat does not remain a benign sign of fertility. The changes in the heavens produce corresponding changes in sea and land: blasts, vapors, mists, and hot, corrupt, pestilential exhalations. Summer is thus connected to a chain of environmental consequences in which atmospheric alteration becomes bodily vulnerability. Heat participates in the larger deterioration of the created order, alongside violent winds, storms, cold, disease, and the disruption of relations among living creatures. This transformation gives Summer a double moral and ecological charge. It is not represented as evil in itself; rather, it is drawn into a world whose natural processes now carry the effects of human sin. The same created elements that once sustained harmonious growth can become instruments of discomfort, illness, and destruction. Seasonal regularity remains, but the old ease of Eden does not. Summer now belongs to a world in which natural abundance and natural danger coexist.

Summer and Human Mortality

The connection between heat and mortality becomes concrete in Michael’s vision of human disease. Humanity is shown suffering from violent disorders, including fever, convulsions, epilepsy, catarrh, intestinal stone, ulcer, colic, dropsy, asthma, and joint-racking rheums. These maladies are presented as consequences of humanity’s loss of temperance and its submission to uncontrolled appetite. Summer’s excessive heat belongs to the environmental setting of this mortal condition, even though the poem locates the deeper cause in human disobedience and the misuse of natural health. Michael’s explanation distinguishes lawful nourishment from gluttonous delight. A disciplined life may extend for many years until death arrives as the natural ripening and falling of fruit, but even that mature death entails the loss of youth, strength, beauty, sensory pleasure, and vital warmth. Summer therefore stands in implicit contrast with the cold and dry melancholy of old age: it suggests the heat of life, yet in the fallen world heat can also become feverish, corrupt, and destructive. Its seasonal energy no longer guarantees bodily permanence.

Climatic Judgment and the Future World

The poem’s treatment of Summer contributes to a broader account of disaster in which climate, moral history, and divine governance are inseparable. Seasonal change begins after the Fall, when the cosmic order is adjusted to a world made vulnerable by sin. Later, the Flood demonstrates the extreme end of this damaged environmental history: rain overwhelms the Earth, while the surviving remnant is preserved in the Ark. After the waters recede, God establishes a covenant represented by the triple-coloured rainbow and promises never again to destroy the Earth by flood. The covenant restores a dependable rhythm to the world. Day and night, seedtime and harvest, heat and hoary frost are to continue until fire finally purges all things and renews Heaven and Earth for the dwelling of the just. Summer therefore remains within the temporary order of fallen creation, governed by recurring cycles rather than abolished by the Flood. Its final significance is eschatological: seasonal heat belongs to a damaged but preserved world whose cycles endure until the ultimate renewal of creation.