Summer is supposed to be the easy season, the one nobody needs consoling about. Dickinson overturns that expectation in her first line, where summer doesn't delight but "troubles." The speaker's question, "What shall I do?", is repeated and rephrased through four stanzas and never answered. By the end we can tell what it is circling: someone is missing. The poem addresses a "Thou" who is "from Here, so far," and the ripening, singing, bustling world becomes harder to bear because that person is not there to share it. The central idea is that the world's abundance can feel like an insult to someone who is separated or grieving. The fuller the summer, the more the absence shows.
The poem never says who "Thou" is, or whether the distance is a road or something final. That silence is part of its power. We get the feeling without the story.
Structurally, every one of the four quatrains ends in a question mark, so the poem is one long, unresolved appeal. The opening stanzas stack up their questions with repeated "What… What… When… When", like someone watching one pleasant disaster after another arrive. The rhyme is loose in Dickinson's usual way. Only the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme, and often barely: "ripe" and "Keep", "stare" and "far". In the second stanza she rhymes "me" with "me", a plain repetition that makes the speaker sound hemmed in by her own pronoun. The only clean rhyme is "Wings" and "Things" in the final stanza, just where the argument finally lands. The lines alternate between longer and shorter, which gives a hymn-like sway, but it is never quite regular.
The imagery turns nature into a crowd of neighbours. Eggs "fly off in Music / From the Maple Keep", a compressed picture of nestlings hatching and taking flight. Calling the tree a "Keep" makes it a small fortress that releases its treasure as song. The skies are "a'chirrup" and "Drop a Tune on me", so music falls like weather, something you can't step out of. The bee "hangs all Noon in the Buttercup", and the verb stretches the hour into a long, hot stillness with nothing to interrupt it. Then the tone turns almost comic. The squirrel "fills His Pockets", as if he were a shopkeeper, and the berries "stare". Dickinson's capital letters give these creatures the dignity of persons, and she makes their cheer pointed. The word "jocund" is slightly formal and old-fashioned, and it suggests a gladness that is relentless, almost rude. The speaker is not describing summer so much as being watched by it.
The last stanza supplies the logic. "'Twouldn't afflict a Robin", she says, in a casual, contracted voice, "All His Goods have Wings." The robin can carry his whole world with him. The speaker "do[es] not fly", and the dash before that admission works like a stumble or a held breath. Her possessions, the "Perennial Things", stay rooted where she is. The word "perennial" belongs to plants that come back year after year, and it normally promises comfort and continuity. Here it reads as a complaint. Judging by the poem's own logic, the flowers and berries return faithfully while the one she wants does not, and she asks "wherefore", to what purpose, she must keep them.
The poem is worth reading for how it handles grief. There is no weeping, no named loss and no deathbed. The emotion is displaced onto bees, berries and a squirrel's pockets, and these ordinary things carry all the pressure. Dickinson reverses the old habit of treating nature as a consoler, and her dashes and capitals make the speaker's voice sound halting and exposed. The poem ends on a question rather than a consolation, so the reader is left inside the problem, in a world too bright for the speaker to feel part of.