Summary
The speaker takes a moment to reflect upon her inability to enjoy this summer afternoon. She reasons that it is because she can already sense its ending even as it has just begun. After finishing her internal discussion, she witnesses the appearance of a divine force.
Analysis
In the middle portion of the poem, the speaker turns inward to ponder why she cannot be happily present during a blissful day. She describes various small indications that summer is already ending even at this early point in the season. These sections delve into the poem's main conflict and explain the speaker's perspective on the passage of time. While the verse structure is the same—quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme—the tone becomes more melancholy here, as the speaker converses with herself.
The speaker lays out her point of view clearly in the seventh stanza: "'When winter comes again, / Where will these bright things be? / All vanished, like a vision vain, / An unreal mockery!" She believes that during winter, when all these "bright things" have "vanished," she will remember them as nothing more than "an unreal mockery." What she means is that when summer ends and all summer splendor has disappeared, its beauty will be meaningless. Brontë uses quotation marks both to shift the voice, making it clear that this is the speaker talking to herself and not describing things in the same register as the opening. In the eighth and ninth stanzas, the speaker revisits two of the images from the opening. In doing so, she strips them of their current, cheerful context and flashes forward in time, envisioning them in the grimmer circumstances of winter and fall. First, she describes the singing birds flying over frozen deserts, "poor spectres of the perished spring." Then, she notes how each leaf on the swaying branches is "hardly green, / Before a token of its fall / Is on the surface seen!'" In both cases, the speaker cannot help but see how something will change or disappear with the end of summer. In other words, she already intuits the end even as the season has just started.
As the speaker finishes her interior reflection, she pivots to a dramatic encounter. As she stretches out "on the moor" in a "fit of peevish woe," she experiences something she isn't sure is real. She describes a dramatic scene of flames ("A thousand thousand gleaming fires / Seemed kindling in the air;") and musical instruments ("A thousand thousand silvery lyres / Resounded far and near:") appearing before her. Following this fantastical occurrence, she says that she sees "sparks divine" in her breath and that the "couch" of "heather" is "wreathed" in a "celestial shine." All of the strange and mystical imagery Brontë introduces here functions as a prelude to the speaker's conversation with a divine presence in the poem's final sections. Brontë seems to use these stanzas to build dramatic tension around this figure's arrival, creating an aura of mystery around what is about to happen.
If the poem's opening is a light portrayal of the setting, then the middle is its thematic centerpiece. The speaker voices her observations about the inevitable passage of time and explicates why she feels removed from the happy day before her. This results in a shift to a more melancholic tone as well as a move into a different register, as the speaker begins to speak to her "heart."
