The End of Summer
It could be that my location in Minnesota – and, actually, this weekend even further north in Minot, North Dakota! – that makes this poem so appealing to me. Those from warmer climes, I suspect, may wonder at its somewhat dour tone. Summer’s end, some may protest, is not occasion for such alarm. Winter is a whole season away. But not in the north country. The end of summer is, in many ways, the beginning of winter. Fall is a transitory state, a brief and glorious transition from the harvest of summer to the long cold night of winter.
And, if we’re honest, we can probably admit that, whatever climate in live in, we still experience just a tinge of sadness at the end of summer – the end of long, casual evenings; the end of lazy days and time away; the end of the pleasant disruptions of vacation and no school and all the rest. So even while we may welcome the slight drop in temperature and turning of the leaves that fall brings, yet the close of summer harbingers not just a transition, but an end, even the end, death.
Which is what, I think, Stanley Kunitz gets at in his evocative poem “The End of Summer.” What I love about this poem are the phrases that are not just evocative, but even provocative, phrases like “agitation of the air,” and “perturbation of the light,” and “iron door of the north.” These words and phrases crackle with intensity, pushing vivid images in front of us that are hard to ignore. Like the end of summer, you can’t avoid the powerful images these phrases carry but must reckon with what they mean. And that’s what poetry, at its best, does. It confronts us with elements of reality – good or bad, easy or hard, comforting or fearsome – so that we might see them, name them, experience them, and in this way really live.
I hope you can enjoy this last weekend of the summer and all that fall and, yes, even winter may bring. In the meantime, enjoy the well-honed words of the poet at this time of endings that lead, in time, to new beginnings:
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
Stanley Kunitz, “End of Summer” from The Collected Poems
Post image: Joan Terrell Smith, Farm Fields Autumn, pastel, detail.
After a gorgeous summer here in Manitoba, we are heading into the beginning of winter. The poem really speaks, or as you poetically state, it “provokes”. Thanks for giving words to the feelings and emotions that I experience each summer’s end.