Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "To Friends of Other Summers" is a meditation on transience, memory, and the imperative to move beyond nostalgia. The poem navigates the tension between youthful vitality and the inevitability of loss, urging a detachment from past pleasures and a bold embrace of existence. Nims employs a formal, almost incantatory structure, repeating Leave it and Be as refrains that mark the shift from reminiscence to imperative, structuring the poem as a ritual of farewell and transformation.

The poem opens with a sensuous recollection of youth, the blood's warm nudge, the arterial music / And chime of the nerve. This invocation of physical sensation situates memory in the body, framing it as an organic force that once dictated movement and desire. The setting—On a summer deck, with girls, in serious evening—suggests a scene of youthful sociability, where pleasure and purpose intertwined. Yet this scene is immediately dismissed with the command: Leave it. Blood will not serve. The juxtaposition between the lush evocation of physical experience and the abrupt rejection signals a shift from indulgence to austerity, as if the speaker is instructing the audience to relinquish the past as one might discard an outgrown belief.

Nims continues this movement through the body, turning from blood to bone. If blood represents immediate sensation, then bone—our friend, was good—suggests structure, endurance, and memory. The reference to water / In bronze July? evokes the timeless pleasure of swimming in summer heat, while the leather sports of autumn expands this to include the ritualized competitions of youth. Again, this is met with Leave it. Put the bone by., reinforcing the notion that even the deeper, more enduring parts of physical life must be left behind.

The next stanza moves from the body to the intellect, recalling those delicate folk in a sea of Mozart. The phrase delicate folk could refer to past friends or a broader sense of refined culture, where appreciation of art and music was central to identity. The whorls of the ear highlight the act of listening, of being attuned to beauty. The Eye clever as glass with a perfect ship built inward suggests a mind capable of internalizing vast, intricate knowledge, a consciousness shaped by precision and craftsmanship. But even this must be abandoned: Leave it. Bury it here. The shift from physicality to intellect and then to burial underscores the theme of letting go, as if the past—whether bodily, social, or intellectual—must be laid to rest in order for something new to emerge.

The imperative changes in the next stanza: Be naked as souls that float in the marbled pasture. The mention of the peasant’s dread suggests a contrast between the anxieties of the living and the freedom of the dead, who are untroubled by rain or love, gout, baldness, virtue. The phrase unafflictable dead evokes a sense of invulnerability, as if death itself grants release from all the burdens of living. The command to Be naked implies a stripping away of identity, history, and attachment, urging the reader to adopt the detachment of spirits.

This spectral imagery deepens in the following lines: Thoughtful, they move at night in the blasted hemlock— / Limbs of pale light. The blasted hemlock evokes both the poison that killed Socrates and a ruined, ghostly landscape. The dead, Having nothing to lose, navigate the world without fear. Their presence in whirling traffic suggests a liminal existence, simultaneously removed from and interwoven with the world of the living. The speaker’s urging to emulate these spirits—Be daring as they—reframes detachment not as nihilism but as a form of courage, an acceptance of impermanence that allows for fearless movement through life.

The final stanza escalates this call to fearlessness: See squadrons fall like keys of a dark piano. / Unmoved. And thrive in the night. The image of squadrons falling—whether literal (suggesting warfare) or metaphorical (suggesting inevitable collapse)—carries a sense of catastrophe, yet the directive Unmoved insists on emotional detachment. The final command—And thrive in the night—transforms what could be interpreted as resignation into something defiant, even triumphant. Night, often symbolic of death or the unknown, is here a space of thriving, suggesting that true existence comes not from clinging to past joys but from embracing uncertainty without fear.

"To Friends of Other Summers" thus operates as both elegy and exhortation, balancing nostalgia with the necessity of forward motion. Nims structures the poem with a pattern of recollection and rejection, urging the reader to relinquish past attachments—bodily pleasures, intellectual pursuits, and even identity itself—to attain a state of fearless being. The spectral imagery, the repeated imperatives, and the tension between remembrance and renunciation create a poem that is both mournful and invigorating, ultimately presenting detachment not as loss but as liberation.

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