"She in Summer" is built on a single suspended hesitation. Nearly every stanza opens with "As if," and the poem never tells us what actually happens. We get a woman lying in the grass on a summer day, and then the poem's real subject: the way the season seems to flood into her body, until the landscape and her desire are hard to tell apart. By the last line she is no longer simply resting in summer; summer, in the shape of "a king," rides through her blood.
That grammatical choice matters. The "as if" clauses stack up (as if she lay, as if she felt), so that the poem reads like one long, trembling comparison that never quite lands on a fact. The whole experience is placed at one remove, as though the speaker watches from outside and can only guess at what she feels. Even the final cry is hedged: "As if she felt (and feeling, cried aloud...)." The parentheses lean in like a whisper. This distance gives the poem its peculiar charge. We are made to look at her, and the poem seems aware of the looking.
The imagery works by turning landscape into something both political and erotic. The grass becomes "the summer's kingdom of desire," and then, in a striking phrase, a "Blond map of openness and multitude." A map is a way of owning and ordering land, and here the whole field stretches out like territory waiting to be claimed. Yet the poem complicates who is claiming whom. The kingdom is "Choosing her as she chose the weighted air," a mutual selection in which she is as active as the summer. "Weighted air" is a good phrase, heavy, humid, almost tactile, the kind of afternoon that presses on the skin. The broken sunlight at the start, with leaves "patterned above her head," gives us the dappling that returns, transformed, in the last line's "dappled blood," where light on the body becomes light inside it.
The sound of the poem supports this slow, languorous pull. The stanzas are tercets, three lines each, and they follow a loose chain rhyme: "lay / head / day" in the first, "stood / desire / multitude" in the second, "air / bed / there" in the third, and "aloud / lay / blood" in the last. The rhymes are not always exact (the second stanza leans on the half-chime of "stood" and "multitude"), and that looseness keeps the poem from feeling mechanical. The lines are long and run on in a roughly iambic pitch, with enough variation that the rhythm drifts and settles rather than marching. Words like "lay," "day," and "bed" recur and echo across stanzas, so the poem keeps circling back to the same sensation, much as the woman turns over to "rest more strongly there."
The word "king" arrives only at the very end, and it lands with real force. Everything before it has been soft and diffuse, sunlight, wind, grass, air, and then a single concrete figure appears, "naked," riding. It is a startling image of desire as something sovereign and almost violent, entering from outside yet somehow belonging to her own blood. The poem leaves open whether this is surrender or power. The woman was chosen, but she also chose; the king rides in her, yet it is her blood, her body, her cry.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes an ordinary scene, someone lying in the grass, and shows how a season can feel like an invasion and a gift at once. It also leaves its own method visible: all those "as ifs" admit that this is imagination, a way of dressing a private sensation in the large costume of kingdoms and maps. The result is a poem about desire that stays oddly gentle, sensuous without being explicit, and full of the heat of a day that seems to hold its breath.