Lying In A Hammock

1.    A lonely man, lying in a hammock, slowly watches the day go by him as he regretfully realizes he’s wasted his life. He’s very aware of his surrounds as if he’s not really needed to be aware of anything else. You can tell that he’s sad and somewhat of an outcast.
2.    He’s lonely and depressed. He’s discontent knowing that he’s wasted his life as he slowly watched it go by.
3.    You can tell he’s alone because there’s an empty house, and the only sounds are cowbells. There are droppings of last year’s horses that haven’t been picked up, which may hint that there’s not really anyone there to clean it up. He’s sad because there’s no one around, which could mean he maybe wanted a family sometime in his life. 
4.    He’s lying in a hammock, at William Duffy’s Farm which hints at the fact that he’s at someone else’s farm, not his own. He’s also in Pine Island, Minnesota.
5.    The poem is filled with many earthly colors like bronze, green, and the colors of the sunlight shown in between the trees. It must be mid-summer because the horse droppings are ‘blazing’. Blazing is a scorching term, not only a warm sunshine feel like you could get in the spring.
6.    The succession goes from a nature-mellow feel to lonely and emptiness, where it concludes at the speaker feeling regret. The time of the poem moves slowly from midday to darkness showing how his feeling slowly turn into gloom.