Nature, the old poetic consoler, is refused its job here. Daniel Whitehead Hicky's "Summer Shall Come Again" opens with a promise of renewal, but the poem exists to deny that renewal any power over the speaker. Summer will return, the roses will redden, the bees will hum, and none of it will matter, because the one person who gave the world its warmth is gone. The central idea is simple and painful: the seasons are cyclical, but a loss is not, and a grieving mind lives in a winter no calendar can end.
The poem is built as a turn. For eight lines the speaker paints summer's return in rich, almost extravagant colour. The rose lends "its bright ruby to the wind's blue hand," a lovely image in which the wind becomes a figure holding out a dish of colour, and the red and blue sit against each other like pigments on a palette. Bees become "bronze orchestras," a phrase that gives their drone both a metallic gleam and a sense of organised, ceremonial music. Streams "speak their music to the sun," and the trees are "green cathedrals." Notice how much of this vocabulary is borrowed from art and worship: orchestras, music, cathedrals. The speaker describes summer as something performed and sacred, which makes the later admission that it will not move him all the more bleak.
Even within the praise, a shadow slips in. The robins "stare at summer till summer is done," and the splendour "ravels to memories." The verb "ravels" is a small masterstroke. It suggests a fabric coming apart thread by thread, and it quietly announces that summer's beauty is already a kind of loss. Before the poem has said a word about the dead beloved, it has taught us to hear impermanence inside abundance.
Then comes the pivot, marked by the repeated opening: "Summer shall come again, and in due time." The phrase "in due time" has a dry, almost bureaucratic flatness, as if summer were a delivery arriving on schedule, and it prepares the blow of the next line, "But in my heart no more her sun will climb." The word "her" matters. Summer has been personified as female throughout, and here the pronoun slides, so that summer's sun and the beloved's presence begin to merge. The woman who has died is, in effect, the true source of the light the speaker once attributed to the season. The final couplets confirm it: "she is gone whose laughter was a bell, / Whose love made bread and wine of every stone." The bell echoes the cathedrals earlier, and the bread and wine give her love a quietly sacramental quality. Her love could turn the barest, hardest thing into nourishment. The closing line, "And kindled stars and moons when there were none," credits her with creating light where the sky was empty, an extraordinary compliment that doubles as a measure of what has been lost.
In form, the poem is a fourteen-line sonnet-like structure with a clear shift partway through, though its rhymes are looser than a strict Shakespearean or Petrarchan pattern. The first quatrain rhymes in a tidy alternating way (rose/blows, hand/land), and the poem later closes on a rhyming couplet (stone/none) that has the finality of a door shutting. Rhythm is mostly a flowing iambic line, and the long, rolling sentences of the first half give way to shorter, heavier statements in the second. The music of the early lines is deliberately lush, so that its absence in the speaker's heart is felt as a drop in volume.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honest refusal of comfort. Many poems promise that spring will heal us; this one admits that the world's beauty can go on perfectly well without healing us at all. The poem's mood is not rage or despair shouted aloud but a quiet, almost courteous grief, the kind that can still describe a rose beautifully while knowing it feels nothing. That contrast, between a gorgeous surface and a hollow centre, is the poem's whole achievement.