Summer, in Rolfe Humphries' "A Green Pride," is a season in which everything seems to be holding its breath. The poem gives us a garden at full green, a flower that stays a flower, a butterfly drifting through the air, and then, hovering behind all of it, the "hour of the sheaves," the moment of harvest and cutting-down. Its central idea is the quiet coexistence of fullness and ending: the most perfect moment of the year is already leaning toward its own close, and the poem makes us feel that without once naming loss.
The structure does most of the work. The first line returns as the fifth stanza's opening, almost word for word, and the "hour of the sheaves" returns with it. Between these two appearances, the poem seems to stop time. The poet describes how the distant hill's "pretence of being far, / Far in time, far in space" has "lulled and held summer still." The word "pretence" is the hinge of the whole piece. Distance is not real; it is a trick of perspective, an illusion that lets the season feel endless. By the final stanza the illusion has failed. The hour of the sheaves is "Even so, coming closer," and the little phrase "even so" carries a world of quiet resignation: despite everything the poem has said about stillness, the approach continues.
The sound of the poem reinforces this tension. There is no regular rhyme scheme and no strict metre, and the lines vary in length, though most are short and soft-footed. What the poem relies on instead is repetition and echo. "Green pride of green leaves" is almost a chant, the doubled "green" giving the phrase a lush, self-satisfied density. "Far, / Far" and "Still, the flower was the flower" repeat in the same way, with the line breaks making the second word land after a small pause. Even the word "still" is doubled across a stanza break: "held summer still. / Still, the flower was the flower." Here the word does two jobs at once, "motionless" in one line and "nevertheless" in the next. The reader feels the poem trying to freeze itself while the grammar keeps quietly insisting on movement.
The imagery is carefully chosen to make stillness precise. "Not one petal falling" is a remarkable claim, because the whole point of a flower at its peak is that its fall is imminent; the poem notices the fall by denying it. Motion is "left to the air," a phrase that reads almost like a rule the summer has laid down: nothing on the ground is allowed to change, so only the air may move. And the one moving thing the poem admits is the butterfly, described through "the paper-thin veer / Of the butterfly's going." "Paper-thin" is a lovely, double-edged detail. It captures the flimsiness of the wings, but paper is also what harvest ledgers and calendars are made of, and thinness suggests how little separates this moment from the next. Notice, too, that the butterfly is defined by "going," not by arriving or staying. Even in the most delicate image of the poem, departure is built in.
The settings of the garden, "arbor, lawn, bower," are all places of shelter and leisure, shaped by human hands for pleasure. Against them the "sheaves" belong to labour and necessity, the practical world that follows beauty. The poem never says that one will destroy the other. It simply places them in the same landscape, one in the foreground and one "over the hill," and lets the reader do the arithmetic.
What makes the poem worth reading is this restraint. It could have been a lament, or a lesson about enjoying the moment, but it chooses to describe instead. The pride of the title is ambiguous: it suggests a flourishing, a proud display, but pride is also what proverbially goes before a fall. Humphries lets that shadow sit quietly inside a phrase that sounds, at first, purely celebratory. By the end, the summer that seemed suspended has begun, almost imperceptibly, to move, and the reader realises that the stillness was only ever the most beautiful form of waiting.