A summer thunderstorm usually gets written up as pure drama, but I. L. Salomon's "Summer Shower" treats it as a small cycle of death and renewal, played out in a forest and centered on a single tree. The poem begins in uneasy stillness, moves through violence and mourning, and ends in a quiet, almost delighted rebirth. Its central idea is that even destructive weather is a kind of passage, and that what comes out the other side is brighter than what went in.
The opening stanza sets up the poem's boldest trick: the birch is not compared to a lady, it simply is one. "The slim white birch is a lovely lady. / She leans on the wind in the maple brush." Once she has a body and a posture, everything else in the landscape starts to behave like a character too. The brook "rebukes" the hermit thrush, a wonderfully human verb, as if the water were scolding the bird for singing. By stanza two the thrush has fallen silent, and the brook is "unsubdued," roaring on stone. The storm hasn't arrived yet, but the forest is already losing its musical balance.
Then the sky itself becomes an animal. The cloud is "heaving shoulders like a roan," a horse-like mass of muscle, and the thunder is "pommelling drums." Notice how the poem switches from soft sounds to hammering ones: the "w" and "l" music of the first stanza gives way to the blunt consonants of "roars," "stone," and "pommelling." The sound of the verse is doing the same work as the weather.
The third stanza is where the poem turns solemn. The rain is "a vast winding sheet," the cloth used to wrap a corpse, and the wind is "lamenting loud." The trees, "cedar and hemlock," "bear the shroud," like mourners carrying a coffin, while small streams, "runlets," wash their feet. Washing a body or feet before burial is an old ritual gesture, and the image quietly lifts a passing shower into something close to a ceremony. Nothing in the poem tells us who has died; the funeral language works more as a mood, a sense that the old, dry, ordinary state of the forest is being laid to rest.
What makes the ending satisfying is how completely the imagery reverses. After the "cloudburst," the leaves "assume green shades of livelier green," a phrase that repeats and intensifies its own color, so that even the grammar seems to brighten. The sun becomes a "gold screen," and mist and light "transfigure" the grass and ferns. That word is a strong one, carrying a hint of religious transformation, and it answers the shroud of stanza three: where rain wrapped the forest for burial, light now changes it into something glorious.
The final stanza returns to the birch, and the poem rewards us for remembering her. She is "renewed," nodding, swaying, trembling "ever so slightly." The restraint matters. After all that thunder, her gestures are small and graceful, almost shy. She wears "the cope of evening lightly," a cope being a ceremonial cloak, and the poem ends on a deliberately playful flourish: "a coral comb in her wet green hair." The solemn robes of the funeral have become a lady's evening dress, and the sunset catches in her dripping branches like an ornament. The storm has turned grief into adornment.
Formally, the poem is tidy in a way that suits its subject. Each stanza is a quatrain, and the rhymes run in an enclosed pattern (abba), so the first and last lines of every stanza frame the two in the middle, much as the forest frames the storm. The lines are long and loosely pulsing, close to a flexible five-beat rhythm, which lets the poem swell and recede like the weather it describes. Occasional inversions, such as "Down comes the rain" and "Whistles the wind," give the verse a slightly formal, old-fashioned lift without making it stiff.
What gives the poem its quiet significance is its refusal to choose between beauty and violence. Salomon lets the storm be genuinely frightening, a funeral and not a mere sprinkle, and still ends with a lady fixing coral in her hair. It is a small, confident lesson in how nature, personified, can teach us that endings and beginnings share the same weather.