Emily Dickinson looks back on a moment when warmth and fullness came to a sudden stop. She calls it the pause of her summer—a peak of ripeness—then asks what harvest could possibly follow. The answer feels stark: her “sentence,” part life-term and part grammatical destiny, had already started pulling her toward a different place or a different person. The second stanza turns wintry and blunt. She accepts a move into cold, both to take something away and to live inside that chill. The final lines crackle with bitter energy—a command to someone else: go ahead and chain your icicle against a tropical bride, as if to say, freeze yourself against impossible heat. The mood is resigned but piercing, a lonely clarity sharpened by the ache of something that couldn’t last.
'Twas here my summer paused — Summary
'Twas here my summer paused What ripeness after then To other scene or other soul My sentence had begun.
To winter to remove With winter to abide Go manacle your icicle Against your Tropic Bride.