Just as the Calendar Began to Say Summer
Just as the Calendar Began to Say Summer - meaning Summary
Nature as an Education
The poem contrasts institutional schooling with the restorative freedom of a summer spent outdoors. Leaving the classroom, the speaker temporarily sheds lessons about usefulness, modesty, money, and industry. Returning in autumn, the speaker carries a different education: nature teaches motion, song, simplicity, and abundance without economic purpose. The poem suggests that attention to the living world can heal the pressures imposed by conventional education.
Read Complete AnalysesI went out of the schoolhouse fast and through the gardens and to the woods, and spent all summer forgetting what I'd been taught— two times two, and diligence, and so forth, how to be modest and useful, and how to succed and so forth, machines and oil and plastic and money and so forth. By fall I had healed somewhat, but was summoned back to the chalky rooms and the desks, to sit and remember the way the river kept rolling its pebbles, the way the wild wrens sang though they hadn't a penny in the bank, the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.
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