Emily Dickinson

I know a place where summer strives

I KNOW a place where summer strives

practised frost

Not random cold—*practised* means rehearsed, deliberate. Summer and frost are skilled opponents who've done this before.

With such a practised frost,
She each year leads her daisies back,
Recording briefly, "Lost."

Recording briefly, 'Lost'

Ledger language. Summer keeps books like a merchant, noting her annual losses in the margin. The brevity mirrors defeat.

But when the south wind stirs the pools
And struggles in the lanes,
Her heart misgives her for her vow,
And she pours soft refrains

lap of adamant

Adamant is diamond-hard stone. She's pouring soft things (refrains, spices, dew) onto something that can't receive them—futile tenderness.

Into the lap of adamant,
And spices, and the dew,
That stiffens quietly to quartz,
Upon her amber shoe.

amber shoe

Dew freezing on her shoe turns to quartz—fossilization imagery. Summer herself is becoming mineral, caught mid-step.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Business of Seasonal Warfare

Dickinson personifies summer as a businesswoman who leads her daisies back each year like a general deploying troops, only to record their loss in her ledger. The word practised is crucial—this isn't chaos, it's a skilled, repeated performance. Summer and frost are professionals at this annual battle.

The commercial language intensifies in stanza two when summer's heart misgives her for her vow. This is contract language—she's made some binding promise (perhaps to keep trying? to accept defeat?) that she now regrets. The south wind represents her moment of weakness, her impulse to break the agreement.

What she does next is striking: she pours soft refrains / Into the lap of adamant. She's offering songs, spices, dew—all her soft, organic gifts—to something stone-hard that cannot receive them. It's the futility of appealing to winter's mercy. The dew stiffens quietly to quartz on her amber shoe, meaning summer herself is being fossilized, turned to mineral even as she tries to give. The amber suggests she's being preserved mid-gesture, like an insect in tree resin—caught forever in the act of offering tenderness to something that will only freeze it.

Dickinson's New England

CONTEXT Dickinson wrote from Amherst, Massachusetts, where late frosts routinely kill spring plantings. This isn't metaphorical weather—she watched this happen.

The poem's power comes from treating this agricultural fact as cosmic struggle. Real New England farmers did keep records of frost losses; Dickinson elevates the ledger to mythology. The daisies she mentions were actual casualties—common wildflowers that bloom early and die in late cold snaps.

Notice the poem never says summer wins. She just keeps trying, keeps pouring out her soft refrains knowing they'll freeze. The amber shoe in the final image suggests summer caught in mid-step, fossilized—not defeated exactly, but suspended. Dickinson finds in seasonal weather a pattern of persistent, doomed effort that continues anyway. The frost is practised because this happens every year. Summer is practised because she comes back anyway.