It will be Summer eventually — (195)
It will be Summer eventually —
Ladies with parasols,
Sauntering gentlemen with canes,
And little girls with dolls
Will tint the pallid landscape
As’t were a bright bouquet,
Though drifted deep in Parian
The village lies to-day.
The lilacs, bending many a year,
Will sway with purple load ;
The bees will not despise the tune
Their forefathers have hummed ;
The wild rose redden in the bog,
The aster on the hill
Her everlasting fashion set,
And covenant gentians frill,
Till Summer folds her miracle
As women do their gown,
Or priests adjust the symbols
When Sacrament is done.
I’m sorry for the Dead to-day,
It’s such congenial times
Old neighbors have at fences
At time o’ year for hay —
When broad sun-burned acquaintances
Discourse between the toil
And laugh, a homely species,
That makes the meadows smile.
It seems so straight to lie away
From all the noise of fields,
The busy carts, the fragrant cocks,
The mower’s meter steals
A trouble, lest they’re homesick, —
Those farmers and their wives,
Set separate from the farming
And all the neighbors’ lives.
I wonder if the sepulchre
Is not a lonesome way,
When and boys, and larks and June
Go down the fields to hay !
To disappear enhances ;
The man who runs away
Is tinctured for an instant
With Immortality.
But yesterday a vagrant,
Today in memory lain
With superstitious merit
We tamper with again.
But never far as Honour
Removes the paltry One,
And impotent to cherish
We hasten to adorn.
Of Death the sharpest function,
That, just as a we discern,
The Excellence defies us ;
Securest gathered then
The fruit perverse to plucking,
But leaning to the sight
With the ecstatic limit
Of unobtained Delight.
From The Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, and Company, 1929), edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson. This poem is in the public domain.