In “Summer Is a Second Season,” April has already disappeared, and the speaker turns to the landscape as it exists in the moment. The title’s phrase “second season” quietly matters: summer is not the first freshness of April but a sequel, a fullness built on an earlier departure. The poem contrasts an unreflective immersion in summer—where there is no need to remember or predict—with a later state of mind that divides life into seasons, names them, and feels their cost. That later state arrives first as a furrowed brow and then as a scarecrow, and the poem closes beneath winter’s covering. The central idea is not simply that summer is pleasant and winter sad; pure presence is fragile, and the act of understanding time may itself be a fall from it.
The opening stanza builds a world of suspension. “The landscape is now” is an odd sentence: an adverb of time sits where a description of place might normally go. It makes the present moment the landscape’s whole identity. The statement “There is no reason / For past or future thinking” is less a command than a report of how this season feels. The plow lies idle in the shed, and the land is “dead / To all motion save the slow / Brilliant blossoming of summer.” The word dead works against its usual meaning: the land is dead to everything except growth. Near rhymes such as season and reason, shed and dead give the stanza a loose music, while the varied line lengths and short declarative phrases create a sense of slowed, resting rhythm. The alliteration in “slow / Brilliant blossoming” stretches the line, as if the speaker wants the blossoming to take its time. The verbs are mostly states—is, lies—rather than actions, so the stanza itself seems to rest.
At “Only later” the poem changes tense and temperature. The “furrowed brow” arrives as a pun: a forehead lined with worry is also the turned earth of a plowed field. Human thought becomes another kind of cultivation, but one that comes after. What it perceives is the “seasons’ separations,” the splitting of time into before and after. The repeated s and r sounds in “seasons’ separations” make the phrase feel deliberate, even clinical, compared with the first stanza’s drowsy fullness. The later mind will “remember and understand / Harsh imprint of spring.” The line break after understand suspends the object, as if understanding itself hesitates. Spring is remembered not as blossom but as an imprint—pressed, harsh, and no longer present.
The scarecrow then moves into view. It “will look down / Longingly on creation,” an upright figure placed in the field but not really part of it. It sees the world it cannot join. In that sense it dramatizes what the “later” consciousness becomes: an observer rather than a participant. The final lines compress the whole decline: “And with snowfall, fall / Beneath winter’s covering.” The word fall appears twice, first buried inside snowfall and then as the action itself. Autumn is never named, but its falling motion is everywhere. The scarecrow, like the person who has learned to remember, descends out of its elevated watching into burial. “Covering” is an ambiguous word—it can suggest protection, sleep, or concealment—but here it ends the poem without any promise of another summer.
What makes this short lyric significant is its compression. Using the small rural vocabulary of plow, furrow, scarecrow, and snow, it traces an entire psychological arc: from unthinking presence, to retrospective understanding, to a final onlooking and descent. It does not moralize about living in the present. Instead it shows that the moment before the brow furrows is already lost by the time it is understood. The title calls summer a “second season,” not a first or a last, and the poem honors that middle position: a brilliance that exists only until the mind begins to divide it from what came before and what will follow.