‘The swallows will still come’'
‘The swallow has come, bringing lovely seasons and lovely years’
- Chelidonismos
Messages from St Andrean shop windows
Today I wandered around St Andrews looking into display windows of shut stores. There were messages left for passersby, that ‘everything will be alright’, that ‘life is about dancing in the rain’, that ‘lobster says wash your hands’; I loved one in particular: ‘the swallows will still come’.
The swallows will still come
Swallows are summer visitors in the UK, arriving as we speak. Harbingers of the arrival of Spring. They are linked to light and life. Carew writes, that in the spring the sun ‘gives a sacred birth / to the dead swallow’ (Carew, “The Spring”). Swallows nest in the winter and migrate towards summer. T. S. Eliot invokes the lost swallows of spring in The Waste Land, ‘O swallow swallow’, (V. “What the Thunder Said”) and Keats describes spring as a time in which ‘gathering swallows twitter in the skies’ (Keats, “To Autumn).
So let us then await spring with the hope of renewal, because the swallows will still come. As Shakespeare writes, ‘true hope is swift and flies with a swallow’s wings’ (Richard III, V.ii.23)
Thought of the Day
So let us then await spring with the hope of renewal, because the swallows will still come. As Shakespeare writes, ‘true hope is swift and flies with a swallow’s wings’ (Richard III, V.ii.23).
-Gabriela Milkova
