Everyone has seen summer, Dickinson begins, but seeing turns out to be only the bottom rung of a short ladder. "A few of us" go on to believe, and a still smaller group, "the more aspiring," love her "unquestionably." The first stanza sorts people by how much devotion they can manage, and its vocabulary is already close to religion: belief, aspiration, love without questions. Then the second stanza turns on a blunt "But." Summer "does not care." She "goes her spacious way," as "eligible as the moon / To our Temerity." That comparison rewards a slower look. "Eligible" is the language of courtship, as if summer were a prize to be won, while "temerity" means reckless nerve, so our love is a kind of presumption. The moon is the right partner for the image. We can stare at it, desire it, write to it, and it stays exactly where it is. Summer is just as visible and just as out of reach.
The final stanza drops people and pronouns altogether. It has no main verb, only a run of capitalised nouns (Doom, Affluence, Ecstasy, Embryo), as though summer's situation were being stamped with labels. "Doom" is a startling word for being loved. It makes adoration a sentence passed on her rather than a compliment paid. Yet she is also rich, with an "Affluence conferred," an abundance handed over. The poem's last image says both are hidden from her, "Unknown as to an Ecstasy / The Embryo endowed." An embryo is given the capacity for joy, for life itself, with no idea of it. Judging by this image, summer is not cruel but innocent. She holds her abundance the way something unborn holds its future, and our worship lands on someone who cannot hear it.
The form quietly supports this. Lines are short, mostly six syllables, and each stanza's third line stretches out (seven, eight, then eight syllables) before a short line closes it. "As eligible as the moon" is the longest-feeling line in the poem, and it does lope along like the "spacious way" it describes. The rhymes are slant and shy. "Believed" and "loved" chime only in their closing consonants, and "adored," "conferred" and "endowed" share just their final -d. In the second stanza, "way" and "Temerity" hardly answer each other at all. "Ecstasy" has no partner whatsoever, which suits the one word in the poem that cannot be matched or understood from outside. Then there are the dashes. Every line of the first stanza ends in one, so the speaker seems to pause between thoughts, and the poem finishes on a dash rather than a full stop. The sentence hangs open, like adoration waiting for a reply that never comes.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) wrote nearly 1,800 poems, most of them unpublished in her lifetime, and the dashes and the capitalised nouns here are typical of her manuscripts. But what makes this poem worth reading is the way it turns a familiar subject around. Many poems about nature imagine the natural world listening, consoling or answering back. Dickinson imagines the opposite and asks an uncomfortable question. What does it mean to love something that cannot know it is loved? The poem refuses to choose between its own answers. The believers can look "aspiring," reaching toward something larger than themselves, or they can look guilty of "temerity," like people shouting at the moon. The "we" in the opening line includes the speaker, which gives the poem a faint self-mockery. She is one of those who have seen and perhaps believed, and she knows how one-sided the arrangement is.
The ending also leaves a small consolation inside the loneliness. If summer cannot know she is adored, she also cannot know she is giving. Her generosity is not a bargain, and that may be why it feels so complete.