Close Reading–Summer Storm
Dana Gioia’s Summer Storm, published in 2001, is a poem about two people who met at a wedding and connected briefly on a patio during a storm, but never spoke again. The connection impacted the narrator so deeply that despite twenty years having passed, the memory of the connection still lingers loudly and begs the haunting question of what-if. What-ifs and what might have beens are things all humans have felt before and I could immediately feel a sinking pain in my chest for many what-ifs in my life. Gioia’s poem about a brief moment of human connection on a patio grabs readers and propels strong feelings of sweet nostalgia and hopeless longing.
The poem consists of nine quatrains—well structured with properly written sentences which makes it easy to read and understand. The language is neither formal nor informal—simply direct. The rhyming sounds at the end of the lines create an enticing lull and satisfying softness when read aloud. When describing the night the two strangers shared a moment on the patio, Gioia uses certain words and images to create the picture of what the two people shared in an almost enchanting way such as “We hugged the brownstone wall behind us / To keep our dress clothes dry”. A few more lines that ignite the poem and give the reader a sense of magical closeness between the two people are “Summer storm / Floodlit against the sky,” “waterfall / Of brilliant beaded light.” These images, paired with the way the poem starts off quiet and slow, the poet describing casually in the first stanza, how the two people came to be there, then a slow intensity builds over the next few stanzas with the light and the magic of a summer storm with two people hugging the wall trying to stay dry and then finally, they touch—“To my surprise, you took my arm– / A gesture you didn’t explain– / And we spoke in whispers, as if we two / Might imitate the rain”. The reader is satisfied with the hope that a new love has just been born against the wall during a summer storm at a wedding, but then the storm receded and so did the love, “I watched you merge into the group / Aloof and yet polite. We didn’t speak another word / Except to say goodnight”. This poem is builds like a crescendo and then recedes like a decrescendo until the reader is left with this experience they’ve just gone through with these two strangers, full of hope and almost love and then—Gioia drives the feelings home with the fact that twenty years has passed and this person is still stuck in the what ifs and longings of that night. We feel what this person feels deeply by the end of the poem. “There are so many might have beens / What ifs that won’t stay buried / other cities / other jobs / Strangers we might have married”. We walk the path of knowing that they’ve both gone on to live separate lives but what if they hadn’t? And that thought brings our own what ifs to the surface in the way the human experience joins us all. The worst of it though (in the best way) is the last stanza—“And memory insists on pining / For places it never went, / As if life would be happier / Just by being different”. This thought stops us in our tracks in an almost full circle way, begging us to question why we pine for things that never happened? Why do we get stuck in a what if instead of what we chose to do with our lives? Are we missing out on what’s in front of us by fixating on a moment that happened decades ago and never amounted to anything? How can a moment impact us so much that we are still affected by it so long after it’s gone?
Thanks for sharing this reading! I appreciate how you describe that shift at the end of the poem, turning what can seem a sort of easy nostalgia into a moment of intense self-scrutiny. As with so many of the poems we read for today, I’m tempted to ask how this poem is also a meditation on form and formalism–or art more generally. This memory, so neatly contained and controlled, spirals out through other possibilities that try to break through as novelty and difference is prized above stability and tradition. The author seems to be both meditating on and correcting this dangerous impulse–the irritable sense of reaching beyond what exists, what is stable.
I enjoyed this poem as well! I agree with your statement that read: “Gioia uses certain words and images to create the picture of what the two people shared in an almost enchanting way such as ‘We hugged the brownstone wall behind us / To keep our dress clothes dry.'” I think another way to phrase this is that Gioia creates a very intimate moment between two strangers, especially the use of vocabulary such as “we, our, hugged.” Gioia couples the stranger together instead of leaving them two individuals. By doing this, when the two part ways, there is a sort of desolation that would not be present otherwise.