Lay It Away by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"Lay It Away" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox is a lyric poem meditating on the deliberate, tender relinquishment of a perfect but finished season of friendship and joy. The speaker addresses a close friend with whom she has shared an idealized summer — a period so complete and luminous that it resists being diminished by continuation or revisitation. The poem's central conceit is the act of "laying away" this summer as one might lay away a treasured but perishable object — not buried in a grave or tomb, but preserved in a kind of conscious, honored sleep, dressed in the "fresh green robes of a deathless spring." The summer is simultaneously acknowledged as dead and rendered imperishable through the imagination. It is gone in fact but kept perfect in memory. Wilcox constructs the poem around a paradox: the speaker and her friend were "willing to let the summer go," yet she also insists that neither will ever find such days again. The willingness to part is not indifference but wisdom — a recognition that clinging to what has ended would corrupt it. To return to the same place, to attempt to revive the experience, would be "like looking a ghost in the face," because time, change, and the inevitable alterations in both people and circumstance would render the recreation a pale and painful distortion of the original. The relationship at the heart of the poem is a deep but unromantic friendship — or at least one the speaker frames in those terms. Its intensity is evident in the assertion that she would prefer never to see the friend again rather than risk the dissolution of the image she holds. The friend is to remain fixed as he or she was in that golden time, unsullied by subsequent change. This is both a tribute and a renunciation: by refusing future contact, the speaker preserves the friend as a permanent inner ideal. The seasonal symbolism carries the poem's emotional logic. Summer, conventionally associated with fullness, warmth, and peak vitality, here also carries an awareness of its own limit — it is "one long, golden day," a phrase that compresses intensity and brevity simultaneously. Autumn and change are implied presences, never named, but structuring the entire argument. The decision to lay the summer away is made before autumn can tarnish it. Wilcox's tone is elegiac but not mournful. There is no weeping, no protest, no bitterness. The mood is one of composed acceptance laced with deep feeling — an emotional maturity that recognizes some experiences are most honored by releasing them rather than pursuing their repetition. The repetition of the phrase "lay it away" across the poem functions as both structural refrain and psychological act: each repetition is itself a gesture of careful, deliberate preservation. The poem ultimately affirms that certain experiences — friendships, seasons, states of happiness — are made sacred not by their permanence but by their completeness. To insist on prolonging what is naturally finished is to damage it; to release it with full awareness and tenderness is to make it last in the only form that cannot be taken away: memory held with intention and love.
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox · First published 1906 · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Romantic Poetry, Elegy · 349 words
First lines
We will lay our summer away, my friend, / So tenderly lay it away. / It was bright and sweet to the very end, / Like one long, golden day. / Nothing sweeter could come to me, / Nothing sweeter to you. / We will lay it away, and let it be, / Hid from the whole world's view.
We will lay it away like a dear, dead thing / Dead, yet forever fair; / And the fresh green robes of a deathless spring, / Though dead, it shall always wear. / We will not hide it in grave or tomb, / But lay it away to sleep, / Guarded by beauty, and light, and bloom, / Wrapped in a slumber deep.
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Lay It Away is listed on Textopian as a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, dated 1906 CE.
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- Work type: Poem
- Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox
- Date: 1906 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Lyric Poetry, Romantic Poetry, Elegy, Reflective Poetry, Nostalgia
- Length: 349 words
- Structure: 1 section, 4 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Easy (6th Grade)
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Genres
- Lyric Poetry — The poem expresses personal emotion and introspection about a meaningful summer friendship, with emphasis on the speaker's internal feelings rather than narrative action, which is the defining characteristic of lyric poetry.
- Romantic Poetry — The poem centers on the emotional connection between the speaker and their friend, characterized by tenderness, intimacy, and the bittersweet recognition that this relationship represents something uniquely precious that cannot be replicated.
- Elegy — The poem mourns the loss of something beautiful and irretrievable, employing funeral and death imagery ('dear, dead thing,' 'grave or tomb') to commemorate what has passed, which are hallmarks of elegiac verse.
- Reflective Poetry — The work is fundamentally a meditation on the past, with the speaker continuously dwelling on memory, the impossibility of reliving experience, and the wisdom of acceptance, making introspection its central mode.
Tags
poetry · American literature · Victorian era · lyric poem · love · loss · heartbreak · memory · emotional reflection · letting go · resignation · sorrow