Summer Noon by Christopher Brennan

Summer Noon

Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,

and fire made solid in the flinty stone,

thick-massed or scattered pebble, fire that fills

the breathless hour that lives in fire alone.

This valley, long ago the patient bed

of floods that carved its antient amplitude,

in stillness of the Egyptian crypt outspread,

endures to drown in noon-day's tyrant mood.

Behind the veil of burning silence bound,

vast life's innumerous busy littleness

is hushed in vague-conjectured blur of sound

that dulls the brain with slumbrous weight, unless

some dazzling puncture let the stridence throng

in the cicada's torture-point of song.

This is an English or Shakespearean sonnet which follows the ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme. There are no real modifications to the poem; littleness and unless don't really sound the same so I guess that is a modification even though they both end in "ess." The turn in this sonnet is in line 9 which is often typical of Shakespearean sonnets. A new sentence is started there and the subject switches away from fire and floods to a wider meaning. To be honest the reason I picked this poem is because I knew nobody else would. I went to a sonnet poem website, scrolled to a random author, and randomly picked one of his poems. I did some quick research and Christopher Brennan is from Australia, so I believe the poem is describing the intense heat there. He describes the weather as fire; it weighs down on the people and tortures them. Lots of personification is used to show how the weather has changed the physical landscape and how it impacts everything and everyone. The sonnet allows for various different descriptions of the heat, and it makes the poem flow well and sound good. 

(http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2013/01/nasas-alarming-map-worst-australian-heat-wave-record/4475/) It's toasty.