Summer afternoons are usually remembered for their noise, but Daniel Whitehead Hicky's "Summertime Hill" is built almost entirely from stillness. A boy lies asleep on a hillside while the world hums around him, and the poem's quiet task is to suggest that this stillness is not empty. Beneath the lazy surface, something is gathering. Its central idea is that a boy asleep in summer is also a boy on the brink of change, with adolescence and desire waiting inside him as thunder waits inside a clear blue sky.
The opening stanza sets a scene so dense with sweetness it nearly drugs the reader. Bees and clover, butterflies sheltering in "the cannas' scarlet throats," lilac, moonflower: the poem is as crowded with scent and colour as a garden. Two details stand out. The lilac's breath is "shattering," a violent word for something so delicate, and the moonflower's perfume is "slow incense," a phrase that quietly turns the hillside into a kind of church. That religious thread returns in the second stanza, where the boy's earlier summers are "forgot like a prayer." The comparison is oddly tender and slightly sad. Childhood, it suggests, slips away the way a half-remembered prayer does, without anyone deciding to let it go.
The boy himself is drawn with a few sharp, affectionate strokes: cap tipped over his nose "to lessen the freckles," hair "captured" by sun and sweat. The humour is gentle, and the verb "captured" is worth noticing. Already the boy is being held by something larger than himself, as he will be again in the final stanza. Hicky also places him "on the green edges of sleep," a phrase that makes sleep a landscape with borders, and the boy a traveller hovering at one of them.
The third stanza lifts our eyes upward. Clouds become "his ships," "pale and lean flotillas," sailing "far up in the oceans of sky." The metaphor belongs to the boy's imagination, a dream-voyage he conducts while lying flat on the grass, and it is the poem's one moment of freedom and motion. Then the camera drops back to earth with a startlingly close image: a hornet exploring "the lashes of a daisy's eye." The daisy has an eye with lashes, which makes the flower a face, and the hornet a creature of menace circling it with unnerving delicacy. Summer's sweetness, Hicky hints, always keeps a sting nearby. Even the wind "blows hot," not soft.
That undertone ripens in the closing stanza. Summer herself, personified, leaves "her secret, sun-bright kiss" on the boy's lips, and the poem names what has been simmering all along: "the slumbering passions within his veins." The simile that follows is the poem's best: he lies silent "as the blue, unspoken thunder in his eyes." Thunder is blue here, an image that blends the colour of a clear sky with the colour of an approaching storm, and it is "unspoken," so the force is real but has not yet found its voice. The boy's sleep and the afternoon's calm are the same thing: both are held breath.
Formally, the poem moves in long, unhurried lines, many with a loose, rolling rhythm of stresses and unstresses that mimics the drowsy pace of the day. The stanzas are quatrains, but the rhyme is subtle rather than insistent. "Lingers" and "floats" in the first stanza, or "prayer" and "hair" in the second, chime softly rather than clanging, so the sound never disturbs the sleeper. Repeated s and l sounds, as in "slow," "slumbering," "silent," "sun-bright," run through the final stanza like a lullaby.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could have been a simple postcard of a drowsy boy. Instead, by letting sweetness, danger and awakening share the same hillside, it captures the strange moment before growing up, when a child is still asleep in his summer but the thunder is already gathering behind his eyes.