A deep, autumnal tone

Well, it's still Autumn, and there are plenty more Autumn poems to subject you to. Since Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind” is probably the next best after Keats, and since the whole thing is very long, here's the finale, which is really rather fine:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Why Autumn?

I've been thinking about the assertion in my last post that there are more poems about autumn than about any other season. I'm not going to back it up with any metrics, but I have an inkling it's true. And I have an inkling I know why it's true. 

First of all, spring and autumn both have a more powerful grip on the poetic imagination than summer and winter. Both are voluptuous, abundant; both have infinite variety. Winter has undoubtedly a spare, silent poetics of its own (Christina Rossetti's “Winter my Secret”), and summer inspires a kind of warm, blowsy doggerel (“Sumer is icumen in”). But both are more active than reflective: in winter the action is survival; in summer, play. Spring and autumn induce an imaginative contemplation, not only because of their richer colours and more profuse growth, but because they bring change. They are heralds and harbingers, and therefore more eloquent than the seasons they usher in. They are full of a promise which summer and winter never quite fulfil (CS Lewis' “What the bird said early in the year”).

But why does autumn beat spring? Partly because spring is perfection, and as Samuel Johnson said, you can't praise perfection. But partly I think because autumn is beauty in the act of mortality (Keats' “Ode on Melancholy”). Autumn is the pith and resin of that everlasting truth in the seeds of all creation that nothing lasts. As Gertrude tells Hamlet, all that lives must die. This thought has obsessed the poets since the very beginning.  What we are most enraptured by is what soonest falters and fades.  There is no halting the turn and fall of leaves, but they are rapturously beautiful in their fall, and to hymn that fall is the closest we get to immortality (GM Hopkins' “As kingfishers catch fire”). Autumn is an opera of the great paradox of human being: life is death.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Since today is an exquisite Autumn day, and since Brad suggested it some while ago, I thought I would post an Autumn poem.  There are heaps - probably more than for any other season - but I find it hard to go past Keats.  I wrote about him in my honours thesis, and seem to remember arguing that this poem was in fact his greatest achievement. Anyway, here it is:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Book Fair Day Two

I forgot that the book fair elves keep filling the gaps with new books, so my second visit proved more fruitful. Here's what I bagged today, for the princely sum of $15:

The Waves, by Virginia Woolf
Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons (I used to have this but it's disappeared - did I lend it to anybody?)
A Question of Upbringing and A Buyer's Market, books 1 & 2 in Anthony Powell's series A Dance to the Music of Time
The New Poetry, a little Penguin anthology of moderns which I bought largely because of Sylvia Plath and RS Thomas
The Fly in the Ointment, by Alice Thomas Ellis
Blessed City, Gwen Harwood's letters to Thomas Riddell in 1943.

Not a bad lot of loot methought.

In the relic darkness of sleep and love

Here's one of my favourite Australian poets, Gwen Harwood, with a poem called “Triste, Triste,” which I think roughly translated means something like “sad, sad.” This one has a paschal flavour, because I forgot to post any one of the great number of good Easter poems last Friday. 

In the space between love and sleep
when heart mourns in its prison
eyes against shoulder keep
their blood-black curtains tight.
Body rolls back like a stone, and risen
spirit walks to Easter light;

away from its tomb of bone,
away from the guardian tents
of eyesight, walking alone
to unbearable light with angelic
gestures. The fallen instruments
of its passion lie in the relic

darkness of sleep and love.
And heart from its prison cries
to the spirit walking above
'I was with you in agony.
Remember your promise of paradise,'
and hammers and hammers, 'Remember me.'

So the loved other is held
for mortal comfort, and taken,
And the spirit's light dispelled
as it falls from its dream to the deep
to harrow heart's prison so heart may waken
to peace in the paradise of sleep.