As imperceptibly as Grief Literary Elements

The speaker is a stand-in for Dickinson, who does not appear directly in the text.

The poem is made up of alternating lines of iambic trimeter and tetrameter. The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABCB, but some of the rhymes are slant.

The poem uses the passing of days and seasons to show how time elapses without notice, but still creates a sense of loss. The central metaphor is about the end of summer. The end of summer is used as an extended metaphor for the passing of time.

Alliteration is present in the D sounds in the line "The Dusk drew earlier in —" and the W sounds in the line "And thus, without a Wing." Assonance is present in the long O sounds of the line "The Morning foreign shone —"

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Nature poetry

Setting is unclear, although given the clarity with which the speaker is observing time in nature, it is reasonable to assume the setting is somewhat rural.

The tone is wistful and melancholy.

The protagonist of the poem is summer, the antagonist is the passage of time.

The main conflict stems from the speaker's desire to hold onto to summer as it ends.

The climax of the poem occurs at the end, when summer makes its abstract leap out of time.

The initial reference to grief foreshadows the way the speaker will feel about summer's end later in the poem.

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Keel is a reference to a structural element of a boat.

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Summer is personified as a beloved guest.

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