Twenty years later, the speaker still remembers a July evening when he leaned on a stile and looked out over fields soaked in unseasonal green. A wandering stranger said, “The lattermath will be a fine one,” meaning the second crop of grass would be good. Back then, the words didn’t need to be prophecy; the speaker felt so full of desire that the whole countryside seemed like a vision of his own future spread before him. Now those fields can never be recrossed. The stranger’s remark returns as an “unaccomplished prophecy,” and the speaker asks, essentially, What came of that promise? The poem’s quiet ache comes from knowing that the “hoar spring” of his later life—grey, chilly, unripe—bears no resemblance to that fertile July. The mood is one of tender, wondering regret, a man pausing over the gap between what life seemed to guarantee and what it actually delivered.
It Was upon — Summary
IT was upon a July evening. At a stile I stood, looking along a path Over the country by a second Spring Drenched perfect green again. "The lattermath Will be a fine one." So the stranger said, A wandering man. Albeit I stood at rest, Flushed with desire I was. The earth outspread, Like meadows of the future, I possessed.
And as an unaccomplished prophecy The stranger's words, after the interval Of a score years, when those fields are by me Never to be recrossed, now I recall, This July eve, and question, wondering, What of the lattermath to this hoar Spring?