like summer colts

The expression “like summer colts” turns the changing air above the Yorkshire moors into an image of unruly, animated movement. Its importance lies not only in the landscape it evokes: when the phrase recurs in Randolph Henry Ash’s poetry and in his account of local language, it helps Roland Michell connect Christabel LaMotte’s writing to Yorkshire and to the possibility that she had been there. The simile thus works at once as poetic image and as a clue in the scholars’ reconstruction of the past.

The Image in Ash’s Landscape

The phrase belongs to a passage that describes the moor after rain. Live vapours rise over the ling, eddying in currents and counter-currents. The image of summer colts playing above a meadow makes that atmospheric movement legible without reducing it to a fixed form: the vapours are at once visible and elusive, energetic yet continually changing. Ash’s lines extend the comparison to geese skimming air and water, then conclude that the moor is both uniform and various. The simile participates in this double vision, where a recognizable landscape is never simply still or singular.

The metaphor also belongs to a language attentive to local description. In a letter to Ellen Ash, Ash writes of walking between the fosses around Goathland, or Godeland, and reflects on alternative place-names as language in the making. He observes that words are among the few traces left by the Norse settlers who farmed and fought in the region; such names, like other human traces, can vanish and decay. Against that historical loss, the living air and the local saying give the landscape a present-tense voice. The colts are not just an ornamental comparison: in Ash’s account, the phrase is something shepherds say.

A Clue in the Yorkshire Investigation

Years later, Roland and Maud walk from Goathland along the becks and fosses. Their route passes the threads and glassy fans of Mallyan Spout, peaty running water, standing stones, foxgloves, and marshland where young frogs leap through the water. At lunch near Nelly Ayre Foss, their attention shifts from observing the terrain to interpreting LaMotte’s work. Roland, having read Melusina, is convinced that she had been in Yorkshire.

His case depends on converging details rather than on the simile alone. He points to local words such as “gills,” “riggs,” and “ling,” as well as the air of the poems, and recognizes the comparison to summer colts as a Yorkshire saying. He also connects LaMotte’s treatment of the air with Ash’s letter. In the landscape explored by the two researchers, the poetic phrase becomes a trace that can be compared across texts, joining local speech, Ash’s description, and the atmosphere of LaMotte’s writing.

Reconsidering LaMotte’s Landscapes

Maud answers with the scholarly assumptions that had kept the clue from being noticed. LaMotte’s landscapes had generally been read as Brittany, as places claiming to be Poitou, or as settings shaped by Romantic local colour, including the Brontës, Scott, and Wordsworth. They could also be treated as symbolic rather than geographically specific. Under those established readings, a recognizably Yorkshire phrase might remain hidden in plain sight.

The exchange marks a change in how the evidence can be read. Roland proposes that the local words and the air of the poems point toward Yorkshire; Maud’s response makes clear why earlier readers had not followed those indications. The simile helps unsettle an inherited geographical interpretation, though the question of LaMotte’s presence is still posed as an inference to be tested. Its force comes from that combination of sensory vividness and evidentiary uncertainty: poetic language preserves a sense of place, but recognizing the place requires readers to listen for the local speech carried inside the image.