Spring is not quite over and summer has not quite begun. That in-between moment is what Dunbar catches in these twelve lines, and he spends most of them making us wait. The oriole sings "as if he were half-way waiting," and the rosebuds "peep from their hoods of green, / Timid, and hesitating." Even the hill in the last stanza is a "waiting hill." Nature seems to be holding its breath, and the poem's central idea is that summer arrives as a sudden release rather than a slow warming. One flash of sun and everything lets go.
The three stanzas follow that idea closely. The first is all caution: a bird that sings only half-heartedly, buds that barely show themselves. The second brings rain, a "torrent sweep," and growth, but the growth is still modest. The shoots are "tender," "yellow-green and tiny," and "thrives" has to share a sentence with "but." Then the third stanza opens with "Then," and the whole mood flips. The verbs show it. Early on, things sing, peep, and come down. By the end, streams "laugh," the sky "smiles," and the woods "run mad." The feelings escalate from shyness to cheerfulness to wildness, as if the landscape were a person gradually shedding their nerves at a party.
The form seems built to let that happen. Each stanza rhymes only on its second and fourth lines, and the pairs are well chosen. In the first stanza, "waiting" and "hesitating" both end in an *-ing* that trails off without settling, which suits their meaning. In the second, "pinety" and "tiny" share a light, unstressed closing sound, and the effect is small and delicate. The final pair, "quiet" and "riot," is the most striking, because the two words sound almost alike while meaning opposites. The poem seems to slide from one to the other with hardly any change, just as the woods do. The rhythm is loose and bouncy, with lines of roughly four beats alternating with lines of three. That gives a skipping, song-like movement, and the short lines, such as "Timid, and hesitating," drop out of the pattern like a small stumble. The steady, neat stanzas also make a nice contrast with the "riot" they describe. The wildness comes out of tidy lines.
Dunbar's imagery works through more than one sense. We get colour in the greens, the "yellow-green," and the "dazzling blue," which is the only strong, unqualified colour in the poem and arrives with the sun. We get touch and sound in the torrential rain and the laughing streams. And we get smell, in the line "the nights smell warm and pinety." "Pinety" is a slightly unusual coinage, an adjective that sounds like the thing it describes, and it makes the Southern night feel close and resinous. The archaic "erst" ("that erst were quiet") gives the final stanza a faintly old-fashioned, storybook tone, as though the season's change were a small legend. Personification does most of the work throughout: shy buds in hoods, a hesitant bird, laughing water, a smiling sky. Nothing in this landscape is neutral, and everything has a mood.
Dunbar is one of the best-known African American poets of his era, and a poem like this shows him working in a gentle, musical standard English, with a light touch and a sharp eye for small details. Its significance lies in how much it gets out of so little. It has no argument and no human characters, yet it still dramatizes a turning point, the moment when waiting ends. The title adds a quiet joke. "Summer in the South" promises the season right away, but the poem withholds it until the last four lines, so that when summer finally comes, readers feel the relief the oriole and the rosebuds have been waiting for.