Crowding into a shade ...

I know the words in Handel's Where'er you walk refer to the trees crowding into a shade to shelter the beloved when she sits, but they came into my head nonetheless when I suddenly noticed the herd of cows - all mums and toddlers, really - that today were crowded into a shade from the hot sun. Usually they're dotted over the roadside field; today they were barely discernible.

And other scraps of poetry floated to the surface of the ragbag that is my brain ... 
The eye can hardly pick them out /
From the cold shade they shelter in, - 
from Philip Larkin's At Grass; and also from Larkin, this time his The Whitsun Weddings:  
sun destroys/   
The interest of what’s happening in the shade.

Good stuff, eh? I think I've turned into my mother, though it was shreds of Browning and Wordsworth that peppered her conversation. I'm grateful - to my bookish upbringing, to the poets who have given me so much, to the random way their language enriches my own.

And I'm grateful that I live in such a good place, especially in this weather!