The eighth month of the Gregorian calendar brings summer to a close, at least on our calendars. Nature will continue with her wise and infinite ways regardless of our need to keep a count of where we expect her to be.

Summer with its heat, its holidays has a lung-bursting capacity to energise our thoughts, our ambitions and our contentment.

Our classic poets, including Phyllis Wheatley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Jane Bronte, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sara Teasdale and a wealth of others, mirror these thoughts and desires in ways that express what the human condition really is; a landscape of feelings and emotions, of friendship and family, of love and an ever-changing world that we call our own.