An equinox is a point of balance: day and night, for a moment, exactly equal. Rolfe Humphries' poem begins at that hinge of the year and then refuses to let it feel balanced. What he gives us instead is a sensory portrait of September, mostly sound at first, that slowly tightens into something close to unease. The final line states the idea outright: "terror in the temperate." The mildest season, the poem insists, can be the most unsettling, because mildness here is simply the sign that something is ending.
The opening stanza is built from ear, not eye. "Daylight or darkness, what you hear" tells us the sound is constant, and the noise itself is described as "vague and feverish whir." Both adjectives matter. "Vague" suggests something that can't quite be located or understood; "feverish" brings in the body, as though the season were running a temperature. By the second stanza the sound has become "September's nervous idiom," a phrase that turns weather into language, a kind of anxious speech. The insects are the speakers: the "brief rest, reiterated hum" is the pattern of cicadas and katydids, which pause and start again. The stanza's last line is flat and plain: "Little enough is left of summer." After the buzzing, the bluntness lands like a shrug.
The form supports this mood. The poem is written in tercets, three-line stanzas, with short lines of mostly four stresses that move quickly and stay light. The rhyme scheme is unusual: the first stanza rhymes all three lines (hear, year, whir), and the second is a mix of slant and near rhymes (idiom, hum, summer), while the later stanzas return to a tighter pattern of full and half rhymes (on, lawn, one; sense, intransigence, intense). The sounds keep almost matching without ever settling, which mimics the whir itself: repetition, never quite resolving. Notice, too, that "hum" and "summer" share their blurred, humming consonants, so the rhyme itself seems to buzz.
The third stanza shifts from insects to machines. "The blades revolve across the lawn / For the last time, or last but one" is the sound of the final mowings, and the line is wonderfully offhand about its own uncertainty. The speaker doesn't know whether this is the last cut or the second to last, and that small hedge captures how autumn arrives: not with a clear announcement but with a gradual loss of certainty. The "blades" also quietly echo the "knives" of the next stanza, which are "duller" now. Even the tools of the season are wearing down.
The fourth stanza is the poem's most interesting move, because it turns from the dulling of the knives to the sharpening of perception. "The sense, / Sharpened by an intransigence, / Insistent rather than intense" is a compact, slightly tricky piece of writing. "Intransigence" means a stubborn refusal to change, and it is oddly applied here: the senses are sharpened by something unyielding, perhaps the way the season keeps pressing on toward its end regardless of anyone's wishes. The pairing "insistent rather than intense" is precise. This is not a dramatic or violent awareness, but a nagging, low-level one, like a sound you can't stop noticing.
That sets up the closing tercet, where the poem finally names what it has been circling. "Heat subside to warmth, and light / Draw in before its opposite" describes the equinox in plain physical terms: the days shortening toward dark. The word "opposite" is a careful, almost clinical substitute for "darkness," which has already appeared in the first line, so the poem has come full circle. Then comes the sharp final phrase. "Terror" and "temperate" share their opening sound and much of their shape, so the two words feel like cousins, one hiding inside the other. The comfortable word and the frightening word are almost the same word.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It takes an ordinary, even pleasant moment, a mild evening with insects humming and a lawn being cut, and shows how awareness of time can turn comfort into dread. It does so with restraint, through small sounds and quiet word choices rather than big statements, and the restraint is exactly why the last line unsettles.