A something in a summer’s day,
~Emily Dickinson
As slow her flambeaux burn away,
Which solemnizes me.
A something in a summer’s noon,—
An azure depth, a wordless tune, 5
Transcending ecstasy.
And still within a summer’s night
A something so transporting bright,
I clap my hands to see;
Then veil my too inspecting face, 10
Lest such a subtle, shimmering grace
Flutter too far for me.
The wizard-fingers never rest,
The purple brook within the breast
Still chafes its narrow bed; 15
Still rears the East her amber flag,
Guides still the sun along the crag
His caravan of red,
Like flowers that heard the tale of dews,
But never deemed the dripping prize 20
Awaited their low brows;
Or bees, that thought the summer’s name
Some rumor of delirium
No summer could for them;
Or Arctic creature, dimly stirred 25
By tropic hint,—some travelled bird
Imported to the wood;
Or wind’s bright signal to the ear,
Making that homely and severe,
Contented, known, before 30
The heaven unexpected came,
To lives that thought their worshipping
A too presumptuous psalm.
I’ve been studiously avoiding this poem for a while because the syntax baffled me in places and I didn’t know what to say about it. I’ve read and re-read it, thinking that I’d write about it, and every time, I came up short. Suddenly, as I’m staring at the end of summer and the start of the school year, I realize that maybe my wordlessness is the point.
Despite the fact that this is a long poem by Dickinson’s usual standards, she too seems to have trouble pinning a word to the experience she’s describing. For the first three stanzas, she repeats the words “a something,” as if she’s struggling to say what she means–or is acknowledging that some things can’t be trapped by language, affixed on paper like pinned insects.
This sense of vagueness continues through the rest of the poem, maintained by words like “veil,” “subtle,” “rumor,” “dimly.” The funky syntax in places helps to sustain this vagueness, too. I’m still not sure exactly how to parse the eighth stanza–“no summer could for them”?!? Really, Emily? But I think now that all this verbal meandering and twisting out of reach is extremely intentional. Dickinson is recreating summer in the form of a poem.
There’s something ephemeral about this sweet hot season–it slips away before we’ve completely made sense of it, fully enjoyed it. Like the poem, with its longer-than-usual length but shorter-than-usual stanzas, summer seems both long and short. And like the poem, it is hazily dreamlike, magical. The three-line stanzas begin to feel incantatory. Dickinson uses language like “shimmering” and “wizard-fingers.” The summer’s day is described as simultaneously solemn, ecstatic, and transporting. It’s a religious experience in the last stanza, with words like “heaven,” “worshipping,” and “psalm.”
I wonder if what Dickinson is doing here is not so much trying to define summer as capture our human experience of it. It is a magical season, a holy one–but then, they all are. Summer is elusive, fleeting. As I read through the poem yet another time, I realize that this is one that will continue to echo in my consciousness as I watch my children swimming underneath the August stars, running wild on the dark dew-soaked grass.
The Emily Project 