Visually, I understand why Solstice and Midsummer Night happen.  My understanding of the phenomenon is so visual, however, that any effort to verbalize would be futile.  Earth’s tilt, yadda, yadda, yadda is about as far as I could go.  And I realize how strange that is, considering how vital a literary muse astronomy can be.

It’s the challenge of getting at the inexplicably that really engages me.  The always reaching for something slightly beyond my grasp and the need to pass that sense of wonder on.  Something like Stonehenge.  People kinda get that this remaining remnant of the ancient world had something to do w/ identifying the seasonal shift vis a vis location of the sun but that’s about it.  Trying to figure out how much the people who built Stonehenge knew about the Earth’s rotation would be kind of like trying to figure out why Tess of the D’urberville’s flight ends at Stonehenge…

…assuming, that is, that Thomas Hardy himself even knew why he ended her flight there. Did he want to parallel the height of summer ritual with Tess’ young life about to end or was the ancient solstice pilgrimage to this great calendarical mystery something that had always captured his imagination and something he had therefore always been waiting for the opportunity to use at some point, in some way.

Wondered for a moment what it could have been like, had Shakespeare set Midsummer Night’s Dream been at Stonehenge rather than the forest near Athens and then realized that even though Stonehenge might have a closer historical connection to solstice, it would have been too solid, cumbersome, traditional and, well, heavy to fit the spirit of the world of the night that Lysander (act i) characterizes as a
“Dream Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, — Behold!
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.”

Tess of the D’urbervilles is inescapable destiny with its center of gravity being her inevitably untimely end, starting with her arrest in the circle of Stonehenge rocks, Midsummer night riles up preconceptions and escapes destiny. Stonehenge, the icon of mid-summer, would have been way too heavy and cumbersome an icon to use for that. Am glad, therefore, the guy stuck w/ branches, sprites and trees. There’s a good reason that Shakespeare revisionism is generally avoided, I guess. Oh, and if you enjoy old-skool paintings of this play as much as I do (That Victorian Fairy Painting exhibit at The Frick round 1999 remains on of my all time favs — saw it on a snowy day between hot cocoa and a blizzard trek through Central Park).  Were the exhibit to ever return, it would make a perfect Winter Solstice activity.