Pan at Oxford has a shaven plain
where the old calendar still has force
St John’s Eve is burnt into the terrain
and hay’s stacked along the dry watercourse
behind the day’s pause something has begun
the dog-star and Sun hunt the lion
in Leo - the sickle swipes at the Sun
to bring down the corn ; then an iron
Venus has the lion by the heart
seizing hold of the stars’ fiery haft -
on the pale lawn a clump of poppies starts
and palpitates in the afternoon draught
by the oldest of times Demeter’s next
her crop ripening on slopes concave convex
Oxford
9 July 2018
An astronomical poem. St John’s Eve is the evening before Midsummer’s Day on 24 June. It was a fire festival that began the hay-mowing and hay-making. Bales were set on fire. The following weeks are the period of the ” Dog days” or canicule, so named after the star Sirius.
The Sun is in Leo and Leo is a double constellation of a lion and of a sickle. The “heart of the lion”, in some languages, where these two images converge, is the bright star Regulus. Qalb al-Asad in Arabic, Kardia Leontis in Greek and Cor Leonis testify to this name, but in the Babylonian MUL.APIN of c 1000 BC, Regulus is described as ” the star that stands in the heart of the lion : the king”.
It so happens that after sunset tonight on 9 July 2018 a near conjunction of Venus and Regulus occurs. They are only a degree apart. And then the wheat will be harvested soon, although it is only a coincidence in this ancient calendar that Venus is where it is now.
Some readers will pick up the reference to the huntsman and dog from Edmund Spenser’s ” July” section of ” The Shephearde’s Calender” of 1579.