Dickinson saw late summer as a book whose unread pages are running out
Emily Dickinson compares the end of summer to a reader who notices, with reluctance, that the finished pages now outweigh the ones still to come. Autumn is only hinted at through clouds and deeper colours on the hills, yet by the last stanza the poem has quietly moved from seasons to immortality.
The opening image is one every reader knows. Deep in an enchanting book, you glance at the edge and realise the pages behind you have gained on those ahead. Summer, the poem says, starts to wear exactly that look. Nothing has ended yet, but the balance has tipped, and the perception arrives reluctantly but surely.
Autumn itself never enters directly. It has to be inferred, from the millinery of the clouds, as if the sky were trying on hats, or from a richer colour in the shawl draped over the everlasting hill. In the third stanza the eye grows greedy for these last displays while thought makes speech more sober, and some Dyer of a distant tree goes back to his "gaudy industry", a lovely way to describe leaves turning. Dickinson keeps the imagery domestic and commercial, full of hats, shawls and dye works, so the grand landscape feels like a household busy with its seasonal chores.
The final quatrain widens the frame. Ending is the course of everything, she writes; at best a thing is perennial, returning each year, and then escapes fixed stability in a way that points toward immortality. The seasonal cycle becomes a small model of death and whatever follows it, which suits a poet whose work centres on nature and mortality.
Dickinson's formal education helps explain the sharp eye. After seven years at Amherst Academy she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before going back home to Amherst. Her schooling was unusually classical for a Victorian girl, and her father kept track of his children's lessons even while travelling on business. The Poetry Foundation credits her with an elliptical language for things possible but not yet real, which describes this poem's autumn well: present everywhere, stated nowhere.
Source: PoetryDB — Summer begins to have the look · Public domain (GB: author died 1886, life+70 expired; US: first published 1896, on or before 1930)
