The Critics’ Corner

Summer’s End

by Don Webb

Three of the poems in issue 355 are “nature poems” in some sense, and all have to do with the change of seasons that is upon us.

One poem recreates a summer idyll; another views a tree awaiting winter; and the third traces a human life in terms of the single season.

Does Becky Franklin’s “A Wish for the Night” imagine nostalgia for a night that has not yet happened? No, “I have always wished for a night like this” says that an ideal finally becomes real.

The poem is dominated by suggestions of circularity: “full moon,” “around the willow tree,” “the rose garden made into a circle,” and “dance around the garden.”

The stillness holds suspended action in the oxymoron “We hear the silence from the dirt road.” The scene ends in sound (“He asked me to dance...”) and in action (“And then picked just one rose / And gave me for a long moment / A kiss for the night”).

“A Wish for the Night” is a scene set with the sensual interplay of silence and soft light in a framework of erotic symbolism.

* * *

Crystalwizard’s “Forest Dweller” views a tree between summer and winter. The poem is marked by alliterations: “tall - stately - stark”; “branches bereft”; “tip - tail,” which provide an internal sonorous pattern that substitutes for end rhyme and regular lines.

The poem depicts old age (“Tall and stately”; “Branches bereft of summer’s cloud of green”) facing an uncertain future (“To awaken to the song of spring / Or die from winter’s ravages”).

The last two lines (“Alone / But not forgotten”) shift the focus from the tree to the narrator and thence to the reader. The poem thus concludes with the moral memento mori, but it is modulated by a note of hope: “To awaken to the song of spring.”

* * *

John Stocks’ “Summer” is more regular than the others, but it has no “march beat” regularity for its own sake, just enough to suit the topic of the poem.

Six stanzas have four lines each, and the last two have five lines and three, respectively. The poem has no end rhyme or even any rigid internal rhythm. Rather, the structure is thematic: it is based on the chronology of life and a set of five existential questions.

The five questions, one for each of the first five stanzas, follow the trajectory of life: childhood, youth, adolescence, adulthood, old age.

What is it we dream of
when the sun has waltzed the clouds
away and suddenly stilled the sky
to the azure serenity of childhood summers?

The first stanza sets the point of view: that of an adult looking at the trajectory of life through the prism of ideal abstractions and the physical forms they may take.

“Waltz” is not a word normally associated with childhood: a child would hardly know the word or, probably, see any relationship between the sun and the clouds. But the poem does not look at childhood through a child’s eyes; rather, “waltz” provides an image of music and motion, nature as art. What other verb would serve as well?

The line break itself provides action to the movement in the sky: “when the sun has waltzed the clouds / away” depicts a completed dance and relegates its ending to the beginning of the next scene, that of the “suddenly stilled sky.” A line break after “clouds away” would end the dance with untimely haste.

“The azure serenity of childhood summers” is an abstract ideal made verbally cohesive by the sibilant alliterations. In concluding the stanza, it illustrates the underlying organizing principle of the poem: the interplay of the concrete (“sun - waltzed - clouds - sky”) and the abstract (“azure serenity of childhood summers”).

Likewise, in the second stanza, “mothers forever young” is an abstract ideal embodied in “July dresses”; and the abstraction of “the innocence of early play” takes concrete form in “the callow softness of our skin.”

The third stanza is elliptical. Following the model of the second stanza, we can supply the understood rhetorical question: “Or lovers as we doze / the afternoon away / [do we dream of] the scents that still ignite desire.” And the tension continues between the concrete (“doze - scents - ignite - fireworks”) and the abstract (“lovers - desire - ecstasy”).

I hasten to the end, regretfully omitting considerations of rhythm and sonority, always rich and subtle in John Stocks’ poetry. The fifth, “old age” stanza restates the full question “Or do we dream of...” with the ultimate tension between the abstract (“souls we have lost”; “those we have loved”) and the reversal of the sun image in the first stanza (“when passing clouds / obscure the sun”).

The coda may seem paradoxical (“the thousand dreams we shared / before we were born”) but it is not; it is a statement of eternal return.

And thus we come to summer’s end...