ABSTRACT
Emily Dickinson's 'nature poem', it is about summer's end or ending; ending is preferable because it better suggests the sense of process, of gradual movement, of slow fading, or evanescence, of slipping away, central to the poem. Nevertheless, the poem does clearly fall into four four-line sections, a structure supported by the pattern of rhyme in the second and fourth line of each section. In the first section, the processes by which summer passes into autumn, and grief loses its original sharpness, are so conflated that it is difficult to know which the primary subject is. The second two lines in the second section: Or Nature spending with herself Sequestered Afternoon equally suggest quiet, stillness, withdrawal even isolation. Nature has turned it upon itself as summer slips away, using itself up, 'spending' itself. The third section of the poem contrasts the times of morning and evening. In the morning, summer, with its bright sunshine, still seems like summer.
