Karly

Long time no see, dear Trust Me, I’m a Linguist section, but this is a special post. The sun lingers a little longer. The days stretch themselves thin, golden and humming. And somewhere, even if you’re not watching, the year quietly begins to tip into its second half. Truth be told though, where I live at the moment, we experience an almost perpetual Summer, so the change in seasons is not as evident as it is in the other side of the pond.

Midsummer has always had a kind of magic (if your brain doesn’t automatically go to the Midsommar film, that is). Not just in the way the light bends or the way time seems to pool rather than pass, but in how we speak about it. It is a season of metaphors, of language softened by sunlight. The solstice, the longest day of the year, invites us to notice the world more closely, and so it’s no wonder writers have returned to it for centuries, casting it as a threshold, a fever dream, a pause between realities.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Light, Love, and Lunacy

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the most famous ode to this strange in-between time. Set in a liminal forest and filled with mistaken identities, enchantments, and poetic confusion, it’s a comedy rooted in midsummer madness. Time here feels both stretched and suspended, and so does language.

The fairies speak in rhymes, the mortals in malapropisms, and the lovers in tangled declarations. In this world of moonlight and mischief, metaphors blossom. Love becomes a kind of spell, and midsummer becomes the setting for transformation, temporary, maybe, but transformative all the same.

Shakespeare gives us a vision of summer as dizzying, lush, and layered. One of the play’s most iconic lines, “The course of true love never did run smooth,” comes not from a wedding or a winter, but from the wildness of summer, a season where logic takes a nap and dreams take over.

The Solstice Across Cultures: Thresholds of Light

Beyond literature, the summer solstice is marked across cultures as both celebration and turning point. In Scandinavia, Midsommar is a moment of joy and fertility, crowned with flowers and bonfires (but again, it’s so not like the film). In ancient Celtic tradition, it’s a moment of balance and ritual, where the boundary between this world and the next was said to thin.

Metaphorically, the solstice is often cast as a crest, the peak of light before the slow slide back into darkness. It’s a natural midpoint, a symbol of both abundance and ephemerality. In language, this duality shows up again and again: the bloom before the wilt, the light before the fall, the flame before the fade.

The sun becomes a metaphor for hope and for warning. It glows in poetry as both gift and countdown, a reminder that even our brightest days are not forever.

Taylor Swift’s “Daylight”: A Modern Metaphor of Illumination

In Lover’s closing track, Taylor Swift uses light as emotional metaphor, too. “I once believed love would be burning red,” she sings. “But it’s golden, like daylight.” It’s a perfect midsummer image: warm, steady, illuminating.

“Daylight” reframes the metaphor of love from heat and fire (associated with passion, urgency, danger) to something calmer, lasting, and radiant. It’s the difference between a flash and a glow, between a match and the solstice sun.

In a way, it’s midsummer in lyrical form. Love becomes something you grow into. Something slow, and golden, and worth staying awake for.

Why Language Turns Lyrical in June

There’s something about June, its slow evenings, its heat-laced air, its promises half-kept, that makes us speak differently. We turn to metaphors not just to describe the world but to shape it, to hold onto what feels too fleeting.

In literature, midsummer is never just a date on the calendar. It’s a feeling, a symbol, a rhythm. It’s the hush before the year turns, the shimmer before dusk, the moment of full bloom.

And so, as the solstice arrives again, maybe we don’t need to mark it with anything grand. Maybe it’s enough to notice the light, to find our own language for it, and to remember, as Shakespeare and Swift both knew, that some metaphors only make sense when the sun is high and the shadows fall long.