Once summer is over, how real does it still feel? Dickinson's answer is: hardly at all. In "Like Some Old fashioned Miracle," the season that has just ended already seems to belong with the stories we were told as children. The poem's central idea is that loss turns lived experience into legend. A June day that really happened begins to feel as made-up as a fairy tale, and the strange thing is that this makes it more moving, not less.
The first stanza sets up this distance with a delayed verb. We wait through "Like Some Old fashioned Miracle / When Summertime is done" before "Seems" arrives, and only then do we learn what is doing the seeming: "Summer's Recollection / And the Affairs of June." Even the phrase "Affairs of June" sounds like gossip or court business, as if summer were a busy society now gone from the room. The lines alternate between longer and shorter, roughly four beats then three, which gives the hymn-like sway Dickinson often borrows. But she keeps loosening it. The rhymes are slant ("done" and "June," "Bays" and "Galleries"), so the sound never quite settles, much as the memory never quite holds.
The second stanza piles up its evidence from folklore: Cinderella, Little John in his "Lincoln Green," and "Blue Beard's Galleries." These are all things everyone knows and nobody has seen. The word "Tradition" matters here, because the stories feel "infinite," passed down so long that no one can find their beginning. "Cinderella's Bays" is the most puzzling phrase, since "bays" could suggest laurels or the spaces of a grand house, and the poem doesn't decide. Bluebeard is a darker choice than the others. Judging by the imagery, a slight chill runs under the sweetness, as though the vanished season has locked rooms in it too.
Then the poem turns to summer's own senses. "Her Bees have a fictitious Hum," Dickinson writes, and the adjective is wonderfully odd. Bees are about as real as creatures get, yet in memory their buzzing sounds invented. The blossoms are "like a Dream," and they "Elate us -- till we almost weep -- / So plausible -- they seem." "Plausible" is a word for arguments and alibis, not flowers. It admits that what we remember is so convincing it is almost suspect, and that happiness recalled in this way edges into grief. Elation and weeping share one line, joined only by a dash.
The final stanza moves from sight to sound. Summer's memories are "like Strains" that we "Review" while the "Orchestra is dumb," and the violin has been "in Baize replaced," put away in its green cloth. Here the poem's sounds do quiet work. The vowel of "done" comes back in "Hum," "dumb" and "numb," a dull, closing note that sinks toward silence, and the last two rhymes, "dumb" and "numb," are full ones, as if the poem has finally landed on something definite. What it lands on is absence. "And Ear -- and Heaven -- numb" is the boldest touch. The loss is not only ours, since the sky itself has gone deaf to the music. Summer's departure leaves a hush on the whole world.
Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and wrote almost 1,800 poems, though few were printed while she was alive. Her dashes and unexpected capitals, which are all over this poem, make readers slow down and weigh each noun as if it were a character in the story. That is exactly what suits a poem about memory. Instead of just saying that summer is gone and we miss it, she shows how absence rewrites the past. By the end the whole season has become a violin in a cloth case, once real and now only a tune the mind replays, and the poem leaves us listening to that replay in a silent room.