Most poems about June are content to gaze at the roses. Helen Hunt Jackson's sonnet begins that way, with a gasp of admiration, and then quietly turns into a warning. "O month whose promise and fulfilment blend, / And burst in one!" is the voice of someone overwhelmed by sheer plenty. June is the moment when spring's promise and summer's fulfilment can no longer be told apart. The speaker even imagines the earth has overspent herself, with "no farthing" left "on fruit, when once this stintless flowering end." Then comes the pivot: "And yet." No flower falls, the poem insists, until it has prepared "at its hidden core / Its tithe of seed." The extravagance turns out to be carefully budgeted.
That idea of budgeting runs through the vocabulary. The earth is a householder with a "roomy house," a "treasure," "wealth," and a "farthing" to spend. A farthing is a tiny coin, so the fear of running out is made small and domestic, the worry of a thrifty housekeeper. "Stintless," an unusual word, means flowering without limit or meanness. "Tithe" is the best choice of all. It means a portion, traditionally a tenth, set aside as a duty, so each flower seems to pay a small debt to the future before it is allowed to fade. The word "we" in "which we may count and tend / Till harvest" draws the reader into the picture, as if the seeds were an inheritance we are expected to look after.
The form supports this movement. The sonnet follows the Petrarchan pattern: an octave rhyming ABBAABBA (blend, store, more, spend, end, before, core, tend) and a sestet rhyming CDCCDD. The turn comes exactly where the pattern expects it, at line nine, when the poem stops describing June and addresses a new listener: "Joy of blossomed love, for thee..." The rhythm is a steady iambic pentameter, but the octave's sentences keep spilling over the line breaks. "No treasure more; / Of all her wealth" and "no farthing have to spend / On fruit" are examples. The syntax overflows its lines just as the flowers overflow the garden. In the sestet the grammar tightens into short questions and then a command.
Those questions are worth a closer look. "Seems it no fairer thing can yet have birth? / No room is left for deeper ecstacy?" They sound like the thoughts of someone at the height of happiness, convinced that nothing could improve on this moment. Joy is being asked whether it has made the same mistake the earth only seemed to make, believing that the peak is all there is. The answer is an order: "Watch well if seeds grow strong, to scatter free / Germs for thy future summers on the earth." "Germs" is used here in an older sense, meaning the small beginnings of new growth. The plural "summers" matters too. The poem imagines love lasting through many years, and it implies that this takes work, since seeds have to be watched.
The final line is the shortest, plainest statement in the poem, and it is end-stopped like a proverb: "A joy which is but joy soon comes to dearth." The key phrase is "but joy," meaning joy and nothing else, joy that only consumes. The ending also draws on the sound pattern. The sestet's last three rhymes, "birth," "earth," and "dearth," set the two extremes of the cycle on either side of the ground that holds them both. "Dearth" is the last word in the poem, a bare, hard word placed against all the earlier talk of wealth.
The poem is interesting because it will not let a celebration stay simple. A title like "A Calendar of Sonnets: June" suggests one entry in a series organised by month, and the form could easily have produced a pleasant seasonal sketch. Instead the sonnet finds a moral inside the natural facts. Beauty, it argues, is not the opposite of planning, since the flower that looks most careless is already making seed. For a reader today the lesson reaches past gardens. The happiest moments last longest when we also look after what will come after them.