Summer is an active time of year when we spend more time
outside, enjoying nature, attending outdoor events, vacationing and, despite
ragweed and mosquitoes, mostly reveling in the sensory pleasures of long sunny
days and a green, growing world. In
mythology summer represents the prime of nature, vitality, fertility, and the
fullness of life, before the decline of nature in fall and its “death” in
winter.
According to this pattern I’ve been spending my summer
gardening and appreciating the backyard pleasures of birds, blooms, and
nature’s bounty, as one might surmise from the neglect of this blog. In search of an appropriate reading to end
this neglect, I began looking for a “summer” poem. One interesting observation is that there
seem to be more poems about the end of summer than about its full glory,
perhaps because poetry is more contemplative than active, and the end of summer
reminds us of the decline and fall to come, inspiring us to poetic meditation.
Amy Lowell’s 1912 meditation on summer (see previous post),
however, takes us in a different direction, making the case for the indoor life
of winter, of city life over “fields and woods,” of intellectual effort over
sensory delights, of human interaction, art, civilization and the life of the
mind.
Lowell invokes the ancient debate over rural vs. urban, body
vs. mind, nature vs. the human realm of intellect, art, and society. Of course, it’s a false dichotomy since it is
no doubt natural for humans to gather in society, to think, to create
artifacts, to “improve” on nature, and seek to mitigate the dark side of “tooth
and claw.” Nature is as fraught with
death and danger in summer as it is with life and growth. And, as Lowell reminds us, the world of art
and civilization in winter can be full of “the pulse and throb of life.”
Curiously, though, Lowell’s poem, while it ostensibly favors
the “human world,” seems to spend as much or more effort on the pleasures of
nature at full bloom in summer as it does on the “labor,” “inspiration,” and
“vivid life of winter months.” The
strongest images in the poem summon “the voice of waters,” “great winds,”
“sunshine and flowers,” “moonlight playing,” a “sleeping lake,” “nodding
ferns,” “the blue crest of the distant mountain,” and “the green crest of the
hill…” The power of the nature imagery seems
to undercut the stated preference of the poem for city life and human society.
Yet the structure and style of the poem support the value of
art and civilization. Written in
traditional blank verse, the poem parallels the Greek choral structure of
strophe, antistrophe, and epode. Lines
1-12 focus on those who find “inspiration” in nature and consider the city to
be “a prison house.” Line 13 makes a
turn, renouncing the preference for nature but, in the same line, announcing, “I
love the earth…” Lines 14-29 develop the speaker’s love of nature in lavish
detail, but in line 30, again there is a turn; and the final 12 lines develop
her preference for “the human world,” which is “like a lantern shining in the
night/To light me to a knowledge of myself.”
The poem could be read as contradictory, perhaps
unconsciously revealing a preference for nature in an argument for human
society, or it could be read as representing a fragile balance between the love
of both. Despite her love of the active,
outdoor life of summer, she longs for the contemplative, indoor life of winter.
So what? Is “Summer”
merely an expression of the poet’s perhaps conflicting preferences? Or is there more to it?
The style and structure, as well as the stated preference
for art and civilization over nature suggest a classic, somewhat aristocratic,
certainly upper class, perhaps elitist, perspective. Some readers may even hear a
quasi-imperialistic message of Western dominance. Others will note how, if there is such a message,
it is clearly undercut by the honorific tone in the nature imagery, with its
implicit celebration of the romantic, the democratic, and all that is wild and
uncultivated.
Contemporary readers may well note that nature is gendered
as “she,” a traditional way of associating women with the body, as opposed to
the mind. Some may even speculate on the
possibility of a subliminal message of conflicted sexuality.
Mythologically, the poem invokes the universal contrast
between youth and age, life and death, body and mind, nature and art.
However you choose to read it, Amy Lowell’s “Summer” is more
than simple self-expression. It is more
like self-reflection or an extended meditation, in which the speaker develops a
complex identity with a complex relationship to her world.
And with that, I return to the pleasures of my summer, with
greater anticipation of and appreciation for the pleasures of winter to come.
