Arthur Stringer was a Canadian novelist, journalist, and poet born in Chatham, Ontario, in 1874. His career often pulled him toward New York and Hollywood, but poems like “The Last of Summer,” written in the early twentieth century when Canadian verse was closely attuned to landscape, keep turning back to the rural northern world he knew first. In this lyric, a late-summer afternoon becomes more than a season ending; it becomes a quiet meditation on how change announces itself through small sensory details.
The poem opens in a held breath: “The opal afternoon / Is cool, and very still.” From the start, the light has a mineral quality, precious and fading. Stringer then washes the sky in layered color—“tawny air,” “sea-green that melts to gold”—so that the horizon seems to blur like watercolor, hill by hill. This is not merely description; the verb “melts” suggests boundaries dissolving, as if the season itself is losing its shape. Even the sounds are placed carefully: a “black crow calls” out of the dark pinelands, a woman sings from a doorway, a sheep-dog barks from the valley-slope, and the echo falls through “umber woods.” Each sound arrives from a different distance, giving the landscape depth, and then each one drops away. The exclamation “and the year seems old!” arrives with the crow’s call, turning a scenic detail into an awareness of time.
The poem’s construction mirrors that shift from fullness to absence. The lines are short and irregular, often pausing on a single image before moving on. Stringer keeps rhyme loose; it surfaces in pairs like “still” and “hill,” “calls” and “falls,” “lies” and “sighs,” as though the poem is finding echoes rather than imposing a strict pattern. This creates a hushed, unhurried movement, closer to thought than to song. The long “and” clauses near the end—“And faint and far the birds fly south, / And behind the dark pines drops the sun, / And a small wind wakes and sighs”—build a processional rhythm, one action following another until the final line cannot be postponed.
What gives the poem its significance is restraint. Stringer rarely states the feeling of loss; he lets the darkening colors do that work. The word “black” appears in the pinelands and the crow, then deepens into “umber” and “dark pines.” The air, first cool and still, eventually moves: a “small wind wakes and sighs,” as if the landscape itself is exhaling at the end of the day. The final sentence, “And Summer, see, is done!”, is both an observation and a gentle warning. The word “see” pulls the reader into the moment, as if to say: this is how it happens, quietly, at the edge of a valley, when the birds have flown and the echo has died.
Stringer’s poem matters because it captures seasonal change without nostalgia or melodrama. It belongs to a tradition of Canadian nature poetry that finds emotional weight in precise landscape, but its compressed form and sensory immediacy also make it feel surprisingly modern. In sixteen lines, a whole world cools, darkens, and stills, and the reader is left not with an argument about time but with the experience of time passing—seen in a fading sky, heard in a distant bark, and felt in the first small wind of autumn.