The Summer Day
The Summer Day - meaning Summary
Attention in a Brief Life
The poem considers how attention to a small living creature can become a kind of prayer. Observing the grasshopper leads the speaker from questions about creation to an awareness that life is brief. Its final question asks readers to consider how they will use their limited time, presenting wonder, idleness, and alertness to the natural world as meaningful ways of living.
Read Complete AnalysesWho made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean-- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?
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