In “The Summer of Peace,” summer arrives as a gentle healer over a war-scarred landscape, covering broken hedges, bare fields, and rocky hills with leaves, flowers, and birdsong. The season calms anger, vengeance, and fevered hate, making the wounded earth green again. But the speaker turns inward and resists that healing. She carries an old, private pain and asks summer not to smooth it away. Instead, she wants it planted with a red rose as vivid as the original scar, lit “like the morning star,” and shaped into something beautiful and alive. The mood is bittersweet and tender: peace is welcome for the world, yet the speaker clings to grief because memory feels precious. Forgetting would be a second loss, so she asks that regret bloom inside her rather than fade away. The title’s “peace” is therefore complicated: outward calm, inward stubborn remembrance.
The Summer of Peace — Summary
Summer comes to the stricken earth. Lays clement fingers of bud and leaf On broken hedge and field's brown dearth And the bare hills' rocky grief; Brings her comfort of May and June, Pours on red wounds the blackbird's tune, Bids with her gallant, imperious green Anger and vengeance and fevered hate Abate.
Deep in my heart is a faded pain None knows: Summer, put there a rose Red as its one-time scar! Bid it flame to a grief again, Bid it sing like the morning star — Shining song of a fresh young woe That none shall know — Spread there the blossoms of splendid regret, I do not want to forget!