Emily Dickinson imagines a place where summer and frost are locked in an annual struggle. Summer, personified as a determined gardener, leads her daisies back each year, only to mark them “Lost” against a frost that has too much practice. There’s a wistful, almost ritualistic failure here—the season can’t keep its promises.
But then a south wind stirs the still pools, and Summer’s heart falters over a forgotten vow. She responds by pouring out “soft Refrains”—spices, dew—into the lap of something unyielding called Adamant. Those offerings immediately stiffen to quartz, even catching on her amber shoe. The mood is one of delicate, crystalline sorrow: the speaker watches a beautiful, doomed effort, where warmth and fragrance are seized by cold and transformed into something hard and permanent. The image of dew becoming quartz on a shoe feels intimate and a little heartbreaking, as if the speaker feels for Summer’s impossible task.