Emily Dickinson's poem "As imperceptibly as Grief" fits into a lineage of poetry about summertime. While many seasons have associations with specific poets (autumn with the 17th-century Japanese poet Basho, winter with 20th-century American poet Sylvia Plath) summer has a particular connotation of being at once long and fleeting. Dickinson was one of a few poets who sought to use this particular season to capture something about a fleeting moment.
Dickinson had long been an admirer of William Shakespeare's work. She named Othello, King Lear, Hamlet, and Anthony and Cleopatra as being among her favorites of his plays, including snippets of quotations from them in her personal letters. In perhaps his most famous poem, "Sonnet 18," Shakespeare draws a comparison between his lover and summer:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
He says they are both "lovely" and "temperate," finding his lover to be even more in possession of these characteristics. Where there is significant common ground between Dickinson's poem and this one is in the way they capture the fleeting nature of this time. The final line ("And summer’s lease hath all too short a date") and the image of "rough winds" shaking "the darling buds of May" capture the all-too-brief close of the season. Shakespeare, like Dickinson, supported an understanding of summer as a strong symbol for the passage of time, in that it is calming and saturated with beauty, making its exit feel all the more abrupt.
Dickinson's familiarity with the Brontë sisters is less well-documented, although it is known that a friend lent her a copy of Jane Eyre. While their exact influence on her is harder to quantify, her poem shares some thematic material with Emily Brontë's "Moonlight, Summer Moonlight," the third stanza of which is excerpted below:
And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.
Brontë portrays summer as a serene space for daydreaming. The image of the "Green grass and dew-steeped flowers / Wave gently round her head" builds a scene in which summer is a peak moment of regenerative solace. While there isn't the same intimation of time passing found in the Dickinson and Shakespeare texts, this poem does try to capture a certain ease evoked by summer's warmth. In this regard, it bears a great deal of similarity to "As imperceptibly as grief" in the way it captures summer's most desirable aspect, its comforting solitude.
While this final poet may not have been read by Dickinson directly, he brought a similar understanding to summertime and the images that it conjures. The following is a passage from "In the Mountains on a Summer Day" by the Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai:
Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.
Like all of the preceding works, Bai depicts summer as carving out a space for rejuvenation. The reader can almost feel the cool wind grazing the speaker's "bare head," providing a momentary balance between cool and warm temperatures. There is a strong sense here that summer provides a moment to pause, to stop and reflect. This moment, of course, has to pass; as the speaker of "Moonlight, Summer Moonlight" will have to rise from the grass, so too will this man take up his hat and continue along his journey in the "green wood."
All these poems imagine summer as a kind of ideal green space, a state for peaceful reflection and daydreaming. At the same time, they also show how brief this moment feels, as these relaxed days quickly give way to the end of the season. As Dickinson's poem elucidates alongside these other works, summer often passes without notice, but its absence is immediately felt in the first chill draft of autumn.
