What Shall I Do When The Summer Troubles - Analysis

Summer as a Problem, Not a Pleasure

The poem’s central claim is that abundance can be unbearable when it arrives in the wrong emotional season. The speaker doesn’t greet summer as relief; she asks, almost anxiously, What shall I do when summer troubles. That verb tilts the whole scene: what most people call beauty becomes pressure. The natural world is not merely happening around her; it is insisting—ripening, singing, dropping itself onto her attention—and the speaker feels singled out by it.

The tone begins in bright astonishment, but it’s an astonishment edged with dread. Even the first images carry a sense of too-muchness: the Rose is ripe, the eggs fly off in Music from the Maple Keep. The nest is a keep, a little fortress of life, and the departure of the young is rendered as celebratory sound. Yet the speaker’s repeated questions suggest she has no matching inner music to meet it.

Sound Everywhere, and the Speaker Under It

In the second stanza, summer becomes almost aggressively audible: the skies are a’chirrup and Drop a Tune on me. That phrasing makes the speaker feel like a surface the world plays. The bee hangs all Noon in a buttercup—an image of effortless, sustained pleasure, as if nature can loiter inside sweetness without consequence. Against this, the speaker asks, What will become of me? The question is not rhetorical; it’s existential. Summer isn’t just weather—it’s a reminder that life continues loudly whether or not she can participate.

Jocund Faces and One Missing Person

The poem’s emotional hinge arrives with direct address: Thou from Here, so far? Suddenly the source of the speaker’s distress clarifies. The summer scene is not painful in itself; it’s painful because it happens under the condition of someone’s absence. The squirrel fills His Pockets, the berries stare, and the speaker can’t bear their jocund Faces. Dickinson gives the berries faces—cheerfulness becomes a kind of expression the speaker must endure, like being forced to look at happiness while grieving.

This is the poem’s key tension: nature’s joy is real, and it is also cruel. The squirrel’s hoarding is practical, the berries’ stare is simply ripeness, but to the speaker these ordinary acts become a taunt because they ignore the missing Thou. The more complete the season looks, the more incomplete the speaker feels.

The Robin’s Advantage: Nothing to Lose

The final stanza sharpens the contrast into something like an argument. ’Twouldn’t afflict a Robin, she says, because All His Goods have Wings. The robin’s whole life is portable; it can depart with itself intact. That idea makes the speaker’s predicament sharply bodily and grounded. I do not fly is both literal and metaphorical: she cannot migrate away from the scene that hurts, and she cannot lift herself into the easy continuity that animals seem to possess.

Perennial Things: Comfort That Won’t Move

The poem closes on a small, devastating contradiction: the speaker calls her attachments My Perennial Things, which suggests steadfast loves, recurring memories, lasting inner goods. Perennial usually means returning; here it also means staying put. If the beloved is so far, then what is perennial becomes a trap—something that persists, but cannot travel to where it needs to be. The speaker’s grief is not only that someone is gone; it’s that her own constancy cannot follow.

A Hard Question the Poem Leaves Hanging

If summer is a season of departures—eggs fly off, squirrels prepare, birds have wings—then the speaker’s suffering may come from being the one creature who must remain. The poem quietly asks whether fidelity is a virtue when it pins you in place. When she says so wherefore, she isn’t only lamenting; she is challenging the logic of having anything that lasts if it can’t also move toward what it loves.