The poem is a small snapshot of a hot day, and it feels stuck in place. Morning already carries the heat of noon, and the air seems thick and golden, like insect-trapped amber. The speaker is held inside that stillness, as if the weather were a kind of prison.
Then the eye drops to the garden, where a dry husk of corn hangs like a "paper fist." It looks like an ear of corn but isn't really one. It seems empty, spent, or withered by the heat. The last couplet turns that thought somewhere darker. Even a real ear of corn, full of grain and life, "cannot raise the dead." The speaker seems to feel that nothing growing in the garden can undo loss or bring anything back. The mood is heavy, quiet, and a little grim. The heat doesn't just make things uncomfortable; it makes everything feel fixed, brittle, and beyond rescue.