Four short lines, no title beyond a row of asterisks, and almost nothing happens in them. Summer is over, or going, and what is left is a smell. Yet the poem ends on a claim that sounds almost defiant: "I am stronger than the sun." Its central idea seems to be that the self can outlast the season that shaped it, because the self keeps summer in the form of memory, scent and a kind of stored light. The poem does not argue this. It lets the images do the arguing.
Start with the scent. Smell is the least visible of the senses, and it is the one we tend to link most closely with remembering. By making it the grammatical subject of the opening line, "Scent of summer remains", the poem puts something invisible in charge. The verb "remains" matters too. It is in the present tense and it is the only verb that belongs to the outer world, so the sentence is about survival from the first moment. Summer has done its work, and what is left is a trace.
The poem then roots that trace in a specific plant: "the sunburnt wormwood". Wormwood is a silvery, aromatic, bitter herb, and English has long used the word for bitterness itself. So the summer being remembered is not simply golden and sweet. The plant is "sunburnt", scorched by the thing that also brings out its fragrance. This is the poem's quiet tension: the sun hurts and gives in the same stroke. The compound "sunburnt" also plants the word "sun" early, so that when it returns in line three we are ready for it.
That third line is the turn. It is the first time the speaker appears ("and I"), and it is also the longest line, about eight syllables against six in each of the others. The extra length suits the boast. The small word "and" is clever here. It makes the claim sound like a natural consequence of the scent, as if being stronger than the sun were an obvious next step. There is no exclamation mark and no punctuation at all. The poem states this enormous thing in a flat, calm voice, and the calm is what makes it convincing. Judging by the imagery, the speaker's strength is not that of someone who conquers the sun. It is the strength of someone who has been burnt, like the wormwood, and is still giving something off.
The last line, "the light in old clothing", is where the poem opens up. Without punctuation it can attach itself in more than one way. It might describe the sun, which would then be "the light in old clothing", sunshine caught in worn fabric. It might be a separate image of what remains, alongside the scent. Or it might describe the speaker, someone shabby on the outside and lit within. All three readings agree on one point. The grand, distant sun is brought down into something humble and close to the body: faded cloth that has been warmed, worn and lived in. If summer is stored in the clothes, and the clothes are part of the speaker, then the speaker holds the sun's light and no longer depends on it. That could be why the speaker is "stronger": the sun comes and goes, but the one who has absorbed it stays.
The sound of the poem supports this. Hissing s-sounds run through it ("scent", "summer", "sunburnt", "stronger", "sun"), like dry stalks brushing together, and they bind the lines into one texture. There is no rhyme, and the lack of it fits the subject, since nothing here is wrapped up neatly. The poem also stops without a full stop, on the soft ending of "clothing", so the thought seems to carry on after the page.
What makes it worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It has the compression of a haiku without following that form, and it rewards slow reading, because each noun (scent, wormwood, sun, clothing) carries more than its size suggests. It also offers a modest, believable kind of resilience. The speaker does not defeat the sun but keeps its light in ordinary things, and that may be a more lasting strength.