Poem "praise in Summer"

Since we can never assume the speaker of a poem is the author, I would most likely say the speaker of this "Praise in Summer" is someone who wants to bring truth to people about life. Through this poem the speaker is giving a lesson on life and the beauty of nature. The speaker is definitely a person who is not taking anything in his life for granted and enjoying the simple pleasures in life, so he is trying to tell us to enjoy the little things in life and not take anything for granted. It seems as if the audience is not addressed and it really could be for anyone in the world. The setting is obviously in the summer and the speaker is praising the glories of summer.

We see many metaphors strung together in this poem, one includes "I said the hills are heavens full of branching ways where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;" which is an extended metaphor, the world is upside down and the mole holes and tunnels are imagined underground. In another metaphor he says "star-nosed moles" we see a comparison to the stars in the sky in this metaphor. The next metaphor we see is "trees are mines in air" this metaphor is a reversal of what we see in our world. The trees are mine shafts being put into the heavens, it's the view of heavens as the earth. The last metaphor in the top half is "see how the sparrow burrows in the sky!" it is adding to the reversal we see in the previous metaphor, and it's also a comparison of the sparrows and moles. The moles are so called "flying" over the surface of the earth and so the sparrow is imagined as flying in the heavens which leads to the mole burrowing in the sky. The metaphors add to the idea that the world and reality are a strange place but we just need to accept it for what it is. We then see a complete shift in the poem although there is no break. After the 6th line we see a doubt in the speaker which is the opposite of the confidence the speaker had in the first 6 lines. The speaker is questioning their highly imaginative self and the speaker accomplishes this by the use of rhetorical questions that he asks. He says "Does sense so stale that it must needs derange the world to know it?" and "Should it not be enough of fresh and strange that trees grow green, and moles can course in clay, and sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?" There is also irony in the poem, there is irony in the metaphors the speaker uses because saying the trees are green is nothing unusual and it is cliché so there is nothing new about the saying.

The oddness of the words being strung together at first seem very confusing but then you realize they go along with the oddness of the world and reality, because of the word choice or diction we can see that normality is actually very strange. So the diction the speaker uses leads to his purpose. The birds flying and trees being green only seem normal since we are so use to it but