This is Fourth Grade?

Here is a video of the Hurt family trying to memorize the first two stanza's of Amanda's poetry homework for the week.

Amanda's teacher likes poetry so a lot of Amanda's homework has been memorizing poems. Up until this week, they have seemed like poems appropriate for a fourth grader. Our pattern has been to read through the poem, define any words we don't know, put it in our own words so we understand it, and then memorize it. This poem...well, we looked up a number of words, but try as we may, we can't really put it in our own words. It's pretty sad when Mommy and Daddy can't even explain the poem to Amanda and she is expected to memorize it and recite it to her class in four days! So here's the poem. Maybe some of you poets out there can explain the parts in red to us (you can use the comment section).

October's Bright Blue Weather
by Helen Hunt Jackson

O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
ye cannot rival for one hour
October's bright blue weather;

When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And Golden-Rod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When Gentians roll their fringes tight
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields, still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October's bright blue weather.

O suns and skies and flower of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October's bright blue weather.

Hmmm...having written all of this out, I think I understand it better now, but I still have no clue how to explain it all to a fourth grader!