Reflection of Emily Dickinson’s Poem “Summer for Thee, Grant I May Be”

The hallmark of Emily Dickinson’s poems is its great simplicity reflecting the abstract, its shortness condensing the intelligibility, its succinctness expressing the abstruse and its vividness contrasting the graveness conveyed. No poem like hers strikes me as hard. And here, the poem “Summer for Thee, Grant I May Be” embodies the basic and essential “Emily Phenomena”.

   Here is the transcript of this poem:

 a. Summer for thee, grant I may be

 b. When summer days are flown!

 c. Thy music still, when Whippoorwill

d. And Oriole---are done!

 a. For thee to bloom, I’ll skip the tomb

 b. And row my blossoms o’ver!

c. Pray gater me----Anemone—

 d. Thy flower----forevermore!

Annotations:

1.      whippoorwill, a north and central American nightjar with a distinctive call

2.      oriole, an old world bird which is related to the starlings and feeds on fruits and insects, the male typically having bright yellow and black plumage.

3.      anemone, a plant of the buttercup family which typically has brightly colored flowers and deeply divided leaves.

 Personal Understandings:

  In the first line of the first stanza, “Summer for thee, grant I may be”, it looks anti-typical of traditional grammar here, but a slight knowledge will enable you to understand the inversion of sentence of structure for balance. Namely, it means allow me to be your summer. People in China, in virtue of a cultural difference, may wonder, the summer days per se are quite characteristic of mosquitoes, stuffy heat and odor, then why Emily, with a strong passion, as we can sense in the proceeding lines, choose the “ summer” as an embodiment of beauty and perfection? In effect, many poets in the western countries have long held a preference for summer as their theme. And it’s a tradition carried on. And many more of them have chosen the summer nights, to which go their eulogies. Here, as a lack of concrete names, I should not mislead you by listing some insufficient data.

  The first flush at the second line may confuse you. We are accustomed to “Time flies”, but here the author employs a past participle to demonstrate what she is getting at is a “state” of the passed summer days, not merely an action of the elapse of time.

  Emily takes a giant jump here. It proves hard for the readers to follow the train of thoughts of the poet to leap from summer days to emphatic sign of the music of an oriole. But such is the feature of Emily, who has the power to write at different perspectives yet arriving at the same theme. I have to point out the succinctness of her diction on account of the employment of “done”, in fact, we easily associate the word with standard poetic vocabulary since it’s frequently repeated in slangs, like “ Done is done”, etc. But it just, in a roundabout way, shows the vivacity of language.

  The poet set another fine thinking moment in the first line of the second stanza, “I’ll skip the tomb”. It may dawn on us that tomb is so abrupt and highly unrelated. But taker a deeper thought, for my money, the “tomb” symbolizes the end of the summer days in abstract manners. And so it shows the devotion and resolution of the poet.

  In terms of the third line, we should notice the novelty of the word “row”, people may mistake it with “sow”, but it just means to sow the flowers row by row.

  Here, to further emphasize on the shortness and simplicity of Emily Dickinson’s poems, a Chinese translation is presented.

  请允许我成为你的夏季

   当夏天悄然而逝！

  我依然是你耳畔的乐音，

   当夜鹰和金莺已不再欢唱！

  请允许我为你绽放，我越过墓地，

   将我的花朵四处播撒！

  请你把我采摘吧———银莲花——

   你的花朵———将永远为你盛开！