The Gardener 78 It Was In May - Analysis

A parched world interrupted by a love-call

The poem begins by making the day feel almost unbearable: sultry noon, endlessly long, and earth that gaped with thirst. That language turns heat into something moral and bodily, not just weather: the land seems to suffer, to wait for relief. Into this strained stillness comes a voice from the riverside—Come, my darling!—and the poem’s central move is to let that intimate summons break open the speaker’s sealed, overheated interior life.

From book to window: choosing the living scene

The speaker’s response is immediate and physical: I shut my book and opened the window. That small action quietly sets up a tension between contained, private attention (the book, the room) and the messy, ordinary world outside. The call sounds like romance, even seduction, but the speaker refuses to stay in the abstract realm of imagined lovers. He looks—almost to verify what kind of love is being spoken into this thirsty air.

The “darling” is a buffalo: intimacy made ordinary

What he sees is disarmingly plain: a big buffalo with a mud-stained hide, and a youth knee deep in water calling it to bathe. The poem makes the buffalo’s gaze placid and patient, giving the animal a quiet dignity rather than turning it into a joke. And yet the mismatch between the overheard endearment and its target creates the poem’s key contradiction: a phrase we expect to belong to human romance is used for animal care. The youth’s tenderness is real, but it is expressed through work—guiding a heavy body toward water in the hottest month. In a landscape where the dry earth is desperate, the river becomes a practical mercy, and calling the buffalo darling is one way of making that mercy personal.

Amused—and then unexpectedly softened

The speaker’s reaction turns on a hinge: I smiled amused but then feels a touch of sweetness. The amusement is the surface response to the scene’s anticlimax; the sweetness is deeper, and it suggests the speaker recognizes a kind of love that doesn’t announce itself with grandeur. In the middle of heat and thirst, affection appears not as passionate drama but as a steady invitation to bathe, to be soothed, to be cared for. The poem ends there, as if to insist that small tenderness—heard by accident, aimed at a buffalo—can still cool a human heart.