Summer Sequence
Summer stars summarize and some are glass glass eyes isinglass eyes in glass houses throwing stones.
Kay Sage
SourceLicence:Public domain (US, unrenewed)
Summer stars summarize and some are glass glass eyes isinglass eyes in glass houses throwing stones.
Hard to pin down at first, this poem works more through sound than through story. "Summer stars" slides into "summarize," and the words seem to generate each other: "glass" repeats, then splits into "glass eyes" and "isinglass," a word for a thin, transparent material. The stars begin as something distant and lovely, but they turn quickly into something cold and artificial, eyes that look but cannot see.
The last line borrows a familiar proverb about people in glass houses throwing stones. Here it lands almost like a warning. After all that fragile, see-through imagery, the stones feel like a threat to everything the poem has built. The speaker doesn't tell us how to feel, and the tone stays detached, a little eerie. Judging by the imagery, the mood is one of brittle watchfulness: a summer night that is beautiful but strangely hollow, where being seen and being exposed start to seem like the same thing.