Nothing in the first ten lines of "It's A Secret" prepares you for its last one. Under the subtitle «Summer», the poem opens like a postcard: hot air, strong sun, a shoreline full of people. Then the final couplet turns the whole scene toward a question about life itself, and the title starts to make sense. The secret is not the weather. It is what the weather has been standing in for.
On the surface, the subject is a seaside summer day seen from a slight distance. The speaker reports rather than joins in. "Summer has arrived it seems" is the voice of someone watching, not someone sweating on the sand. The details are honest rather than glossy. The bugs are "noisy, loud, and annoying," three near-synonyms piled up like a complaint, and the colour of the season is "yellowish greens." That "-ish" is a nice, unglamorous touch, suggesting leaves a little faded by the sun. The one relief is the sea breeze, and even that comes with a hint of hunger, since the people are "wishing for more." More breeze? More summer? The line never says, and that unspecific wanting turns out to be the poem's real engine.
The form is simple: twelve lines in six rhyming couplets. The rhymes are often loose. Shining and annoying, greens and seems, older and vigor are echoes more than perfect matches. This gives the poem a relaxed, spoken sound, like someone listing what they see. Each line carries roughly four beats, but the rhythm bends to fit the meaning. "The heat, the sun, the yellowish greens" is a heavy stack of stresses that slows the line the way a hot afternoon slows a body. Two lines later, "Energetic enough to not mind the heat" tumbles forward in a rush of unstressed syllables, as if it were running down the beach with the children it describes.
Those children carry the poem's second movement, from a single day to a whole lifetime. Their laughter is "so sweet," which borrows a taste word for a sound. Then comes "The child from spring has grown older." Spring here reads as childhood, and summer as the stage after it. Within one couplet we have stopped looking at a beach and started looking at a life. "Absolute vigor" is a large, almost boastful phrase, but it suits the idea of youth at full strength.
The last couplet pays off all this build-up: "Oh how lovely summer is in life / How strange it is to not be alive." The "Oh" is the first time the speaker lets feeling break through the reporting tone. The rhyme is also telling. Life and alive are almost the same word, so the poem ends by circling a single idea rather than reaching toward a new one. The final line can be read in at least two ways. It may be a living person imagining the strangeness of not existing, the winter that follows summer. Or, given the title's promise of a secret, it may be a voice looking back from outside life altogether. The poem does not choose, and that ambiguity is its most interesting feature. The word "strange" is also a quiet choice. It is not "terrible" or "sad," just a mild, puzzled understatement, which is more unsettling than a cry of grief.
The poem has rough edges. "Heat" appears again and again, and a few lines lean on filler. But the repetition makes the heat feel inescapable, and the plainness lets the ending land with more force. Its significance lies in how that ending changes everything before it. After the last line, the bugs, the breeze, the sweat and the laughter stop being background and become evidence. They are ordinary things you can only notice while alive, and even the annoying ones count. A reader who goes back to the opening finds a different poem, a catalogue of small pleasures, and perhaps small irritations, that make up being alive. The secret is that these details are the point.