Summer - Analysis

A scarred landscape that refuses to be called nature

Judith Wright’s central claim is blunt and corrective: the value of this place is no longer in any imagined, pristine former nature, but in its ongoing effort to recover from harm. The first sentence renames what a reader might be tempted to romanticize. This is not a pastoral summer scene; it is a site defined by injury and repair, by a struggle to heal itself. The tone is steady, almost clinical at first, as if the speaker is insisting on accuracy over comfort.

Mining as bodily violence: stone that drank dark blood

The poem makes its accusation through physical detail. The list of materials—ironstone, mudstone, quartz and clay—sounds like geology, but it quickly becomes anatomy and trauma. The earth drank dark blood and heard cries, and the phrase running of feet brings human panic into the ground itself. Wright doesn’t need to explain who was hurt; the landscape carries the testimony. By giving the rocks ears and a mouth, the poem suggests that extraction was not just industry but an assault that entered the body of the place and left it altered.

When the human settlement collapses, another city appears

A quiet turn happens with Now. The miners’ presence has dwindled into ruins—miners’ huts reduced to a tumble of chimney-stones—and the poem registers this without celebration. It’s not a neat moral reversal, but a change in occupancy: Shafts near the river now shelter a city of wombats. The word city is striking, borrowed from human life and handed to animals, as if the place is rebuilding its own society inside the leftover architecture of damage. Even the shelter is compromised: the wombats live in shafts, the very wounds dug into the ground, turned into reluctant homes.

Healing that looks like scabbing, not redemption

What recovery looks like here is deliberately unpretty. Wright chooses the language of skin: Scabs of growth rather than lush regeneration. The new life—lichens, algae, wind-bent saplings—is small, tough, and slow, the kind that can cling to rocks and persist in poor conditions. The ellipsis after grow… feels like a long breath: the speaker can’t speed time up, can only witness the incremental covering-over of the wound. The tension is that healing is real, but it is also a reminder of injury; a scab both protects and announces that something was torn.

The burned summer and the speaker’s failed wish to see like they do

In the final lines the poem’s focus shifts from the landscape’s body to the speaker’s mind. In a burned-out summer—a season that should suggest ripeness but instead suggests exhaustion and fire—the speaker tries to see without words As they do, aligning perception with wombats and with the nonhuman life that simply inhabits. Yet the poem ends on a concession that is also a trap: I live through a web of language. The desire is for direct, unmediated attention, but the reality is that human seeing is entangled in naming, judging, and explaining.

A hard question the poem leaves in your mouth

If the place’s best quality is its struggle to heal, what does language do to that struggle—does it honor it, or does it turn it into a story that feels finished? The speaker’s wish to see wordlessly is also a wish not to dominate again, yet even calling the growth scabs frames the land in human terms. The poem holds us inside that contradiction: we can’t stop speaking, but we can become more responsible about what our speaking does.

What Summer finally insists on

By ending with the web of language, Wright refuses an easy ecological consolation. The landscape can outlast the miners’ huts; wombats can claim the shafts; lichens can begin the slow work of covering stone. But the speaker’s awareness remains marked by the same history the ground remembers—blood, cries, and the aftereffects that still shape how one looks. The poem’s sober beauty comes from that double recognition: recovery is happening, and yet neither the place nor the observer can return to innocence.