Hardly anything is harder to describe than the moment just before sleep, when thoughts loosen and the world goes soft. James Whitcomb Riley's "A Summer Afternoon" tries to catch that moment from the inside. A speaker lies in the open near a wheat field, with a book he has given up on and a mind he has told to take the day off. Over seven quatrains the heat, the haze, and the small noises of birds and insects work on him until he can barely hold his eyes open. The central idea is the pleasure of surrendering to stillness, of being "at anchor from all storms of mental strain." The poem also enacts that surrender, and by the last line the speaker is losing the struggle in front of us.
The imagery is built on a sea metaphor that runs quietly through the first half. The breeze moves the wheat until "the golden seas / Break in crisp whispers at my feet," so the field becomes a shoreline and the sound of dry stalks becomes the hush of surf. The metaphor is picked up again when the speaker lies "at anchor," and "storms" now means worry rather than weather. The calm is made to feel like a harbor, a place where the mind is safe because nothing is asking anything of it. Even the breeze is tired, since it breathes "with labored respiration," as if the afternoon itself were a heavy sleeper.
The most playful moment comes in the second stanza. The speaker's neglected book is flipped open by "a critic wind" and "affrightedly reviews itself again." The wordplay is neat. A critic writes reviews, so the wind-as-critic leafs through the pages and the book "reviews" itself, nervous at being judged. Riley turns the whole business of literary effort into something faintly comic beside the indifferent weather. The katydid gets the same treatment. Its call is usually written as "Katy did, Katy didn't," an endless argument, and here the insect is too drowsy to remember which side it was on. Everyone in the poem, including the bugs and the book, is too tired to quarrel.
The sound of the poem helps. Every stanza rhymes ABAB, which gives the verse a gently rocking regularity, and most lines settle into a steady ten-syllable iambic line. Riley shortens some lines at moments of fading. The first stanza ends on the brief "Break in crisp whispers at my feet," the third on "Dimmed through and through with shade," and the fourth on a six-syllable fragment, "Like one that hears it rain." That last phrase sits in quotation marks, as though borrowed, and its meaning is lovely: to hear rain without really listening, to let sound wash over you. The shorter lines work like a breath running out before the line is finished.
Stanza three makes the reader work in the same sleepy way. Its sentence begins "Off through the haze that dances in the shine" and holds back its main statement, "The forest lies," until the third line, with the sunlight "showering" and the haze "dancing" in between. The reader has to drift through the clauses much as the speaker drifts through the afternoon, and the forest itself arrives as a "silhouette design," flat and dim, more of a shape than a place.
The sixth stanza contains the poem's best paradox. A bird's twitter is cut short, the echoes fade, and they "Sink into silence, all the more profound." The sounds do not break the quiet. They measure it, the way a pebble dropped into a well tells you how deep it is. The last stanza then gives up on smooth composition altogether. The dove's "Coo-coo!" breaks into the speaker's sentence, and his own thought ("I mustn't") is chopped by dashes until it limps to "fall asleep!" The sentence he is trying to finish is the one he is losing, and the line ends on the very thing he swears he won't do.
That ending is why the poem is worth reading. Many poems describe a quiet afternoon, but few let their own grammar fall apart to show it. Riley keeps the tone light, with a joke about critics and a katydid that has lost its argument, and he does not overload the scene with moral meaning. What remains is a small, accurate record of how it feels when the mind finally stops working and the world goes on without it.