Summary
Stanza One
A speaker who appears to be caught in mid-thought addresses someone, possibly the reader. The speaker imagines this person in the future, near the end of the next year. The weather is warmer than usual with a wind from the southwest still carrying the aroma of the summer rains. The wind also has the power to strip the tree limbs of their leaves.
Stanza Two
The tense keeps the poem in a hypothetical future as the speaker directly addresses the other person about what he will experience. The speaker assumes that the person will feel a sudden onslaught of positive sensation and will cry—standing there in the abnormally warm winter wind. Autumn leaves will be falling around him as he wonders what is causing this emotional outburst. Struggling to understand the sudden manifestation of feeling will stimulate questions of when he experienced similar surroundings previously, and who else was there when it occurred.
Stanza Three
The speaker is insistent that the other person won't remember the memory, despite his nostalgia, and will instead continue to stand there with the feeling of the wind against his body and the clusters of leaves decaying on the grass. With his eyes closed, struggling to recall, the person will ask out loud “With whom?”, according to the speaker.
Stanza Four
The last stanza depicts the person trying to remember his past experience, and place the memory that has evoked such an emotional response. In his efforts, the speaker foretells, the person will ask out loud: “Ah where?”
Analysis
In this poem, the speaker explores the way our psyche flits in and out of an awareness and understanding of our past. By using second person narration, the poem draws the reader in to its world, and we feel that the speaker is gesturing to a shared human experience of which we are a part. We are reminded of moments when we felt similarly confounded and touched by an inaccessible recollection.
In this poem, memories—the bedrock of our internal life—are hyper-present and evocative in one moment, and elude us in the next. Time travels in and through us, and we stand, helpless, before the forces of mortality and nature, not quite knowing what has happened to us. And yet, we know something has happened to us; presumably, we have loved, we have lost or we have been moved by what we have experienced.
In the first stanza, MacLeish evokes the splendor and perpetuity of the seasons, which—like our moods and the drift between joy and pain—are always changing and leaving us bewildered. The universal human experience of nostalgia is visceral here. We are reminded that everything beautiful eventually changes and dies: “the southwest wind that smells of rain and summer / Strips the huge branches of their dying leaves” (lines 3-4). Like the seasons, we, too, are shifting, and think “thoughts that like the grey clouds change” (line 8). As beings in flux, we do not always know what constitutes us.
Then, MacLeish places us in pensive spaces (“And you at dusk along the Friedrichstrasse / Or you in Paris on the windy quay”) in which we are left pondering our stake in all this transformation (lines 5-6). The conjunction “or” between these two locations seems to suggest that we could be anywhere and everywhere, in a way, because the emotional sensation transcends place and time.
When this sudden feeling overtakes us, we are fleetingly stunned by where we have been versus where we are now; in other words, what time and loss really mean for us. Our mind protects us from feeling the memory in full force, or wholly comprehending life’s transience—and yet, the speaker reminds us that still, “the tears come to [our] eyes” (line 10). Our mind is vacillating in its indecision around reminiscence or oblivion.
The poignant memory has peeked through into consciousness somewhat, though we still do not understand why “suddenly sweetness / Fills [our] heart” (line 9-10). This is the tragic and sublime nature of the human experience: that we simultaneously gain and lose so much. If the faintest hint of a heartrending memory overwhelms—can we bear to know more?
And yet, we are simultaneously compelled to remember more, to keep track of what has been. MacLeish writes, “When was it so before, you will say, With whom?” (line 12). He is aware of our longing to know ourselves, as well as the power of forgetting. He sees how we fail repeatedly to recall our past. Standing amidst the “wind” and “dying leaves,” we become cognizant of the imperceptible and the dead, which become a metaphor. Like the dying leaves, our faded memories remind us we are propelling toward a trajectory of disintegration. Worth noting is also MacLeish’s inclusion of wind in every stanza; perhaps to emphasize symbolically a force that is both powerful and invisible, like a buried memory.
MacLeish writes about the moment we hope to retrieve: “You will not remember this at all… / You will close your eyes: With whom, you will say, // Ah, where?” (lines 12-17). Although we will likely not remember, the poem’s end suggests that we will never stop trying to remember. Further, we will be so moved by the memory and by wanting to remember, that we will be compelled to ask these final questions out loud. Regardless of our success in recollection, this poem shows us that memories will continue to move and constitute us with or without our knowledge. By the end of the poem, we are reminded of the vast and unfathomable qualities of nature and the human condition, alongside these same qualities of the mind.
