18 pages • 36 minutes read
Geraldine ConnollyThe Summer I Was Sixteen
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Perspective on Memory
The motif of memory pervades the entire poem, as the poem itself is explicitly a memory, but Connelly crafts the motif with unusual complexity. The implicit presence of adult consciousness—the narration itself, the adult poet remembering her youth—uniquely dramatizes the recollection, and the double, adult-child consciousness magnifies both the naiveté of youth and the gravity of age. This dynamic emerges with distinct clarity in the poem’s final line, where the subtle sophistication of the phrase “improbable world” (Line 20) exudes the aged poet’s self-awareness and creates an irony; the poetic voice clearly speaks from a position of greater knowledge than her younger subject. It is also the most abstract phrase in a poem otherwise dominated by the concrete detail, marking a departure from the immediate sensuality of youth to the restraint and reflection of adulthood.
While a perspective on memory informs the poem itself, it also plays into the poetic act of creation. Connolly’s dual perspective—writing, as a knowing adult, about her teenage self—allows her to preserve some of the innocence that she lost as she grew older, placing value on both her innocent and knowledgeable experiences.
The Chain Link Fence
The fence through which the young Connolly glances in the final stanza symbolizes the divide between her childhood and adulthood. Fences commonly represent prevention: They are sturdy barriers used to keep an individual in place. However, because the fence is “chain link” (Line 20)—steel wire woven into a lattice—there is the suggestion that this barrier is not wholly solid. Teenage Connolly sees through the gaps in the fencing, aware for the first time of how close the world of adulthood is.
Her age is again important here because 16 is only two years shy of 18, the age of legal adulthood in the United States. However, the fence also symbolizes protection, surrounding teenage Connolly’s carefree childhood landscape where she maintains her innocence and ignorance to the wider world until she fully comes of age.
The Bees
The bees appear in the middle of the poem after the young Connolly and her friends “paraded the concrete, // danced to the low beat of ‘Duke of Earl’” (Lines 8-9) and made their way to the poolside snack counter. The bees symbolize the physical and mental state of the girls, mirroring their contentment. The bees buzz around sugary sweet foods and drinks such as “Dreamsicles” (Line 10) and “cherry colas” (Line 10), inevitably “stagger[ing] into root beer cups” and drowning (Lines 11-12). The diction “stagger” (Line 11) presents the bees as happily dazed, as if drunk off of summer itself. In the same way that the girls are “Oiled and sated” (Line 7), the bees are in a state of carefree bliss, so relaxed that they drown in the very source of their pleasure. Connolly emphasizes the joy of being unencumbered by adulthood anxieties, using the bees as an anthropomorphism of the teenage girls’ happiness.
