Late summer is usually pictured as ripeness, a season of plenty, and Rolfe Humphries opens by pulling that picture apart. His speaker stands in a landscape so motionless that the Roman goddess of orchards and fruit, Pomona, begins to look like Medusa, the figure whose gaze turned living things to stone. The poem is a small act of defiance against that stillness. It describes a world frozen at the peak of abundance, then ends by begging the goddess to let time, wind and human warmth start again.
The central idea is that fullness can become its own kind of death. Nothing in the scene is damaged or threatened; the heat simply holds everything in place. Humphries makes this unsettling by choosing details that should be alive and showing them arrested. The first is the pair of lovers beneath the willows, whose branches "hang down like chains of green and heavy stones." The simile does the work of a verdict: even the leaves are weights, and the lovers stand inside a structure of bars. They "neither move nor whisper," and the taller one stays "unbending for the kiss." A kiss should be a moment of motion, and here it has hardened into a pose. The poet then likens them to "the deaf, the rigid," the "most hopeless listeners / Locked, shut, held fast, in nothing." The final phrase is the sharpest in the poem. They are not trapped in something but in nothing, and the emptiness is more frightening than any prison.
The second image deepens the effect. By the cove lies a great log "with the broken antler," which the speaker reads as an old ram or mountain sheep that "came / To drink, and failed, the water being steel." The animal's story is told almost as a parable of the whole landscape. Water, the thing that sustains life, has become metal, hard and unyielding, so the thirsty creature dies at the very edge of what it needed. The log is "Heavy and huge and gray," three flat adjectives that match the dead weight of the scene. Notice that the speaker half-invents this history, since it may only be a log. That uncertainty is part of the poem's mood: in a trance, everything starts to look like a petrified creature.
The form mirrors this. There is no rigid stanza pattern. Lines vary in length, and short ones, like "No breath whatever stirs / This warm domain of hers," feel like held breaths, their rhyme closing with a small click. Elsewhere the rhymes appear and vanish, so that "kiss" and "pose" and "those" echo one another briefly, then dissolve into the loose, broken line "Locked, shut, held fast, in nothing." The rhythm often stumbles on commas and stops, as if the verse itself cannot move freely. The opening line is almost a stage direction in its repetition: "Everything still, oh, absolutely still." That "oh" gives away a speaker who is more uneasy than admiring.
The ending reverses the mood. The speaker turns directly to the goddess, "Oh, goddess, goddess, need it be this way?" and the doubled address sounds like prayer shading into protest. What he asks for is specific and sensory: let the wind rise, let branches move, let "garments flutter." The last picture, "the singing girls" carrying home the harvest "in the cool of love," restores what the rest of the poem lacked, which is sound, motion, coolness and human warmth. Fittingly, the word "cool" arrives only here, after so much heat.
What makes the poem worth reading is its inversion of a familiar idea. Poets often fear decay and the passing of time; Humphries fears the opposite, a moment that refuses to pass. He borrows the language of myth to suggest that even a generous goddess can be dangerous when she stops giving and starts holding. For a short poem it manages a surprising range, moving from unease to horror to a plea that is also a small hope, and it leaves the reader listening for a breeze.