At this time the rye stands full grown and green over the whole of Northern Europe. From a point of vantage anywhere out in the country long rippling fields extend round the whole horizon, and you know that further, where you cannot see it, it continues in the same way; if you travel by train the landscape changes character, but the rye stays the same, hour after hour, for days you see nothing but the blue-green living rye-fields. They have turned the surface of the earth into one big farm; it ripples acre after acre on the big estates in Mecklenburg and way into Russia, Denmark is one huge swelling rye-field, the rye goes in waves on the emerald-green slopes by Upsala, and in Norway it ripples all the way from the dales in the south up towards the midnight sun. The rye grows in the light nights.

While this is being written the rye is in its highest summer glory, still green and creaking with its growth, luxuriant as the pelt of some animal bursting with youth. The wind runs over it and shakes every single straw, the ears roll and swing together with the other ears that stand near in an exuberant swell, and together they make a wave: the field looks like a lake and has the same tense, mobile surface as the sea. Nothing is as lush as a field of rye seen from nearby, the edge of a field which stands tossing, excited by the wind, and tries to sling its greenness to the sky, as it were, storm it with ears of corn; and to see the rye rippling in the distance is an even more delightful sight, a field far away where the waves can just be seen like faint irregularities slowly moving up over a hill. At the edge of the rye, green as the edge of a piece of broken glass and glimmering with its thousands of stalks, the cornflower breaks through like blue sparks, the pretty red corncockle stands further inside, in the tropical green twilight there is in the middle of a field of rye; and at the foot of the rye, but out in the open along the edge, grow the poppies, quivering in the still air with their flames and their charred gullets. What a wild forest for the mouse who sets off on an expedition before sunrise between these myriads of dizzy high crystal-green stems! The ant who gets lost there!

As the rye is now, green and strong, is its finest time. It ripples, the swallows fly upwind and downwind over it, quick as humming-birds and with a song which sounds like the second-hand of the day’s hidden clock. A bumble-bee drifts leisurely from flower-cup to flower-cup by the fence. It is as if the sun has a scent, or the silence; a sunny strange perfume pervades the wide silent land and the blustery day. It is the rye’s dry aroma. How blue the sky is! As I see the rye rippling in the distance, the slight waves chasing each other to the horizon, distant and leisurely as if they nearly stood still, they are like time, like time in its motion. The summer does move like that. The faraway lines of waves remind me of the South Sea islands, where you can see the long parallel rollers of the Pacific beyond the coral reef, one after another, seemingly motionless. I have seen petrified fragments of the sea-bed from millions of years ago, where the marks of the waves are preserved, just as alive — yes, just like a field of rye today! When I stand by a rippling field of rye, I feel I am in the presence of eternity.

But the rye cannot be green for ever. One day, it flowers; one fine day with suitable sun and wind the field stands smoking and smells like a paradisean dream, of a multitude of hot, fermenting things; it is the wild chase of the pollen-grains. When it is over, the rye falls to rest again, loses its transparent clear greenness and begins to ripen. A remarkable phenomenon, the flowering of the rye, and well worth falling into wonderment over! A quite huge, unimaginable number of grains of pollen are scattered about here, billion on billion. I imagine that the pollination, so explosive and so sudden, is due to a colossal microscopic snowball-dance, where the drifting pollen-grains are so many that they cannot help knocking against the pollen capsules of other ears, which then spring open too and add their own brood of airworthy embryos to the general mobilization. An enormous contagion, a bombardment which spreads over the field in an instant, a general knocking on doors and liberation — and then over and knock on your neighbour’s door till the whole field is a wildfire of fertilization! It is a question of getting as far away from the mother-ear as possible and on to a far, strange one; this is the plant’s blind law — and not entirely unknown among humans either. When the pollen’s excitement is over the ears begin to become pregnant, heavy with bread, now the corn must become yellow and ripe. Much can happen yet before it manages to fulfil its destiny.

The light nights before midsummer with bird-song and green rye, let that time last, we bless it and give thanks for it while we have it. The elder-tree is in blossom. As long as the rye is green and looks after itself one may abandon oneself to some unprofitable enthusiasms; later come serious, anxious times enough, heads of families tapping the barometer and thousands of existences hanging on the whims of the weather. There is no small sum of money bound up with the rye, the fate of whole lands and peoples stands and ripples on the field. But let the harvest wait till it is time for the harvest.

The time when the rye is green coincides with the light nights, with the hidden call of the cuckoo; one can never tell if it comes from the bird itself, or is an echo, other summers, other cuckoos. The light nights have a message for us all, even if the aesthetic effect is limited to relatively few. Many a simple being of the weaker sex leaves the light nights with the beginnings of a little creature who will come into the world some time in January, and others who meant no harm at all were to blame for it. People who are made entirely of wood are at least shaken out of their habits; there are those who cannot sleep in the short light nights and pass the time in the open: I hear various sounds of nocturnal activity which I let go in at one ear and out of the other in my sleep. I like to enjoy the light nights asleep, but with one eye half open. I like mixing the summer night with my dreams. I don’t much care what is real, or if I am awake; I let an eternity go by, notice with pleasure that it is light, light inside and outside, and let another eternity pass. Did someone shout, do folk fight madly at 4 o’clock in the morning? The flies buzz around so hotly, as if they were writing something of the utmost importance in the air and then crossing it out again.

Turgenev has a passage of sensitive prose on how poetry comes to him in the shape of a little winged woman clad in all the colours of the rainbow. Poetry comes to me in my sleep in the light nights, and I dream that I play with horses or that I fly. First of all you have to be an extra good sleeper with the blood in first class condition if you want to dream about horses; and then, asleep and with the light nights in your heart you may feel as spontaneous and happy as a horse. The air about me in my dreams is pure horse, pure horse and sunshine, velvet and south wind; our existence is a game, a painless golden soaring through the whole world; we roam in meadows, there is a foal who jumps right over my head, while I myself clear fantastic obstacles. Lord, how free I am, how much I can do in my dreams!

But now I fly! I fly in my dreams as so often before, I can do anything I want to: I make myself strong and rise from the field right up im the air, not high, just a few feet, with my legs drawn up under me and with a certain inner expansive force which I feel holds me up. And now I merely float above the ground, stand freely in the air and advance at a good steady rate, still at the same height above the ground, and still uncertain whether I shall clear the treetops and other things that lie ahead. Most people, I dare say, know this flying in their dreams. It has also been attempted to explain the phenomenon physiologically: some think that it is a sort of memory from the time we were Pterodactyls, flying reptiles from long ago — a very attractive idea coming from a German brain, others hold that it is merely a mental reflex action, whereby a particularly free and pleasant breathing comes to the consciousness of the sleeper or the half-sleeper. However it may be, we fly, that is something we can do. The feeling is no doubt very different from what a real flyer can tell of — you are first and foremost free of gravity in your dreams, you are just carried up into the air by sheer bliss.

I am flying, and down below I can see the swaying rye. It is light and yet not daylight, everything is unreal and yet true, just like the light nights. The waxing moon is in the sky. The half which is in shadow can be very clearly seen; diagonally below is Venus, shining peacefully: it fills my heart so that I can climb a little higher still, just because I see the moon and the beautiful summer star; and I fly through the light night, over the rye tossing restlessly beneath me and advancing in nearly imperceptible waves to the far horizon. Do I pass over a town with red roofs, gardens full of lilac? Long, deserted streets with trees on both sides? By a blue bay I see a plump, handsome girl swoop down and take water over herself like a gull: it seems to me that she also moves as if in her sleep. The sky ahead is shining yellow, and I feel myself one with the yellowness, have it in my heart, it is this fire which bears me. I know the rye as I float above it: the rye which framed my childhood with its waves wandering out into the wide world. I am at home. I fly well, hold myself up because I can now, the only thing that surprises me is that there should exist anything that one cannot do. All that is needed is to believe, you just have to will it.

And why should we not dream, if it makes things dearer to us?