A single emptied cup sits at the threshold of Yone Noguchi’s «The Passing of Summer», as though the season itself has just been drained. The opening line, “An empty cup whence the light of passion is drunk !—,” is both a statement and a broken cry. “Whence” lends the image an almost ritual gravity: the cup did not hold ordinary liquid but the bright, intoxicating energy of high summer. That energy has not faded by degrees; it has been drunk, used up, taken away. The exclamation mark and dash together make the line cry out and then stop short, enacting the poem’s larger movement from heat to silence.
What follows is less a picture of autumn’s arrival than a series of notices of absence. “To-day a sad rumour passes through the trees,” the speaker says. The verb “passes” quietly repeats the title, so the passing of the season happens in small, continuous acts. “Rumour” suggests something half-heard and unconfirmed: the trees seem to whisper news of the change rather than display it. The next line deepens the cold: “A chill wind is borne by the stream.” The passive phrasing makes the wind feel carried rather than self-propelled, as though the water itself has become a courier of cold. Then the waves “shiver in pain.” A landscape is given a body, and that body reacts involuntarily to what has been lost. The shiver is small, human, and immediate.
The final line sharpens the feeling of absence into a question: “Where now the cicada’s song long and hot ?” The cicada carries particular weight in Japanese poetry as an audible marker of summer’s sustained heat. Its song is long, repetitive, almost inseparable from the air. Here the speaker does not say the cicada has died or fallen silent; instead, the line asks where the song has gone and offers no answer. The phrase “long and hot” stretches across the line with open, heavy vowels, letting readers almost hear the sound that is no longer there. The question mark arrives after a pause, as if the speaker has searched the air before asking. This is the poem’s central achievement: it makes silence audible by asking after a familiar sound.
Formally, the poem is free verse, unrhymed, and built from abrupt line-length shifts. The first line is expansive and metaphorical; the middle lines contract into shorter images; the final question opens slightly into one long searching breath. Punctuation carries much of the rhythm. The dash after the first line breaks the opening cry, the semicolon joins the wind and the shivering waves as cause and effect, and the closing question mark turns the whole poem outward. No moral is stated and no consolation offered. The poem ends on an unanswered “where,” leaving the reader inside the same hollowed-out atmosphere the speaker describes.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does through subtraction. Rather than piling up autumnal colors or listing changes, it isolates a few sensations—an empty cup, a rumour, a chill wind, shivering waves, a missing song—and lets them stand for an entire emotional condition. Summer becomes a kind of passion, and its passing becomes a bereavement. Because the images are so few, each one has to carry great weight, and the reader feels the absence rather than merely understanding it. In only a few lines, the world of the poem grows colder, quieter, and more uncertain, and that swift hollowing is why it lingers long after the cicada has gone.