The speaker begins with an old rural scene: a bear sleeping in a cellar hole, pine needles covering a granite doorstep, an oak growing where a forge once stood. Everything human is quietly sinking back into the woods. Then the speaker’s mind turns to a more recent kind of ruin—abandoned gas pumps, diner signs, a car with a wildcat waiting on its roof, a buckled highway sprouting goldenrod, and a crashed plane overgrown with vines. In both pictures, creatures and plants are taking over what people left behind. The mood is not sad so much as dreamy and accepting. There is a sense of time passing and things wearing down, but also of life continuing in stubborn, beautiful ways. The speaker seems to find comfort, even wonder, in how naturally the wild returns.
New Hampshire — Summary
The bear sleeps in the cellar hole, where pine needles heap over the granite doorstep. And the well brims with acorns and the broken leaves of the oak tree which has grown where the anvil rusted in the forge.
When my eyes close, I can see another summer: a bark of rust grows on the trees of the gas pumps, and the EAT signs gather like leaves in the shallow cellars of diners, and a wildcat waits for deer on the roof of a car. Blacktop buckled by frost starts goldenrod from the highway. Fat honey bees meander among raspberries, where a quarrel of vines crawls into the spilled body of a plane.