Peter Viereck's "Stanzas in Love with Life and August" begins with a question that sounds almost like a dare: what can this wind do to these August leaves? By the end, the poem has answered it with a quiet, sorrowful "nothing, for now, and then everything." What looks like a lush celebration of high summer turns out to be an elegy being written in advance, a poem that loves its subject precisely because it can already hear the end approaching.
The structure is built around a refrain. Between the long, dense stanzas, a single line keeps surfacing, shrinking each time: "A pair of slight tennis shoes is hurrying by in August," then "Is hurrying by in August," then "Hurrying by in August," then just "Hurrying by." The girl in white cotton socks, blouse and smock is never named and never described beyond her clothes, so she becomes less a person than a moving spell, the thing that suspends the garden's violence. And as the refrain contracts, so does the hour she buys. The poem is showing us time running out by literally cutting off its own sentence.
That hour is the heart of the poem's central idea. "For one whole hour nobody can harm a leaf," the speaker insists, and the whole piece is a charm against decay. Wind is commanded like a pet: "Down, death; down like a spaniel; / Down, wind; down, she said." The rhododendron, imagined as "a great carnivore / Lunging in one green leap upon the sun," is all appetite and rage, yet it "fawns" before the passing socks and the "burr-starred smock." Desire tames everything here, and the poem's brief truce between "peace and rage and the music of growth" is love's doing.
But the charm leaks. The speaker keeps trying to shrug off what he can already hear: "But if you hear far unseen apples thud? / What is it to us?" The question is quoted, as though another voice were whispering it, and the answer is too quick to be convincing. The thuds return, "closer," and the harmless breeze is renamed: "Menace is the name of the small breeze between the leaves." The word "Turning-point" sits alone on its line, a stage direction in the middle of the lyric. Apple-red, the colour of ripeness and fall, is called "unasked for," which is a lovely way of saying that fulfilment and decay arrive together.
The sound of the poem carries this tension. The opening runs in loose iambic lines that ripple the way the leaves do, and Viereck mimics wind in the syntax itself: "Apart, together; apart, together again." Rhyme is used sparingly and almost secretly. "Bough" and "although," "foam" and "loam" chime without ever settling into a pattern, so the poem feels natural, like growth, rather than clipped into couplets. The imagery is dense with the body: leaves have "ears" and "green ankles" that "kick as crazy as you choose," and sap runs "through blue veins under cotton blouses." Nature and the human figure keep merging, which is why the final plea can ask August itself to "bleed / Your ebb's arterial green" back into the soil.
The closing stanza widens the view with surprising coldness. Under the green, "Cold moles grub past each other underneath," while overhead "Hot comets hurt each other as they pass." Everything is passing everything, and the girl in the tennis shoes turns out to be just one case of a universal condition. The final couplet makes this tender rather than bleak: "Eyes have met eyes while all that green stood still; / Though it took but one small breeze to snap that spell." A glance is as fragile as a season, and the last line promises only that eyes will "glance backward after August goes."
That backward glance is what makes the poem matter. It refuses both denial and despair. It lets itself be besotted with a moment while knowing, with a gardener's honesty, that the green "thinks not of all the death it fed upon" and will feed new life in turn. Few poems about summer admit that the loving is partly the losing, and fewer still manage to make a refrain do the dying for them.