The royal month of August

August 4

Now the hardback and meadow-sweet reign. 

The mayweed, too, dusty by the roadside, and in the fields I scent the sweet-scented life-everlasting, which is half expanded. 

The yellow Bethlehem-star still, and the yellow gerardia, and a bluish "savory-leaved aster."

The grass is withered by the drought. The potatoes begin generally to flat down. The corn is tasselled out, turnips growing in its midst. The farmer with his barns and cattle and poultry and grain and grass. The smell of his hay.

As my eye rests on the blossom of the meadow-sweet in a hedge, I hear the note of a cricket, and am penetrated with the sense of autumn. Was it sound? or was it form? or was it scent? or was it flavor? 

It is now the royal month of August. When I hear this sound I am as dry as the rye which is everywhere cut and housed, though I am drunk with the season's wine. 

The farmer is the most inoffensive of men, with his barns and cattle and poultry and grain and grass. I like the smell of his hay well enough, though as grass it may be in my way. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 4, 1851

In the fields I scent the sweet-scented life-everlasting, which is half expanded. See August 4, 1852 ("I smell the fragrant life-everlasting, now almost out; another scent that reminds me of the autumn.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Aromatic Herbs

The yellow Bethlehem-star still. See June 15, 1851 ("The Hypoxis erecta, yellow Bethlehem-star, where there is a thick, wiry grass in open path; should be called yellow-eyed grass, methinks. "); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Yellow Bethlehem-star

The corn is tasselled out. See July 12, 1851 ("The earliest corn is beginning to show its tassels now, and I scent it as I walk, — its peculiar dry scent.");  July 27, 1852 ("I now perceive the peculiar scent of the corn-fields.")

A bluish"savory-leaved aster. See July 29, 1852 ("That common rigid narrow-leaved faint-purplish aster in dry woods by shrub oak path, Aster linariifolius of Bigelow, but it is not savory leaved. I do not find it in Gray."); December 26, 1855 (“Weeds in the fields and the wood-paths are the most interesting. Here are asters, savory-leaved, whose flat imbricated calyxes, three quarters of an inch over, are surmounted and inclosed in a perfectly transparent icebutton, like a glass knob, through which you see the reflections of the brown calyx.”); see also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Savory-leaved aster

My eye rests on the blossom of the meadow-sweet. See June 20, 1853 ("Meadow-sweet out, probably yesterday. It is an agreeable, unpretending flower."); July 11, 1851 ("The meadow-sweet has bloomed")

It is now the royal month of August. See August 18, 1852 ("There is indeed something royal about the month of August"); August 10, 1853 ("August, royal and rich")

I hear the note of a cricket, and am penetrated with the sense of autumn. See  August 4, 1852 ("Have had a gentle rain . . . but still I hear the cricket. He seems to chirp from a new depth toward autumn, new lieferungs of the fall. ");   See also  August 3, 1852 (" I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano."); August 18, 1856 ("  I hear the steady (not intermittent) shrilling of apparently the alder cricket, clear, loud, and autumnal, a season sound. Hear it, but see it not. It reminds me of past autumns and the lapse of time, suggests a pleasing, thoughtful melancholy.")  and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Cricket in August

August 4. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  August 4 

I hear a cricket

and am penetrated with 

the sense of autumn. 

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025