15 August—At the Litchfield post orifice the other day, a garden-savvy neighbor was assuring a COVID refugee from New York that what the immigrant thought was dead grass was actually just hibernating during the drought, waiting to be awakened by a soaking rain.

Pedantic prick that I am, I felt obliged to correct the gardening maven. Grass hibernates in the winter, I pontificated, just like bears, bats, and bumblebees. Well, almost like animals. In fact, the very word comes from the Latin, meaning to spend the winter.

The proper word for spending the summer in a state of torpor or suspended animation (like parched grass, pupils, students, and teachers) is æstivate or estivate if you can’t manage the æ digraph (or ligature, known as an æ, pronounced ash). It’s pronounced estivate, as in Festivus, or (if you want to be classier) eastivate, as in Clint Eastwood. It comes from the Latin, meaning—you’ll never guess—to spend the summer.

The timely topic of æstivation reminded me of a marvelous poem I hadn’t read for quite a while. No surprise that the poem is titled Æstivation. You simply can’t improve on that title. The poem was written around 1858 by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a brilliant physician, poet, polymath—you name it. He was Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s father.

Because he didn’t relish the adulation Æstivation was certain to heap upon him, Dr. Holmes credited the poem to his “late Latin Tutor” and never published it. One of the great poems in the English language, Æstivation speaks for itself. Eloquently and elegantly. Here it is:

In candent ire the solar splendor flames;

The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames;

His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes,

And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.

How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes,

Dorm on the herb with none to supervise,

Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine,

And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!

To me, alas! no verdurous visions come,

Save yon exiguous pool’s conferva-scum,—

No concave vast repeats the tender hue

That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!

Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades!

Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!

Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,—

Depart,—be off,—excede,—evade,—erump!

Any comment would be superfluous . . .