I am on a brief road trip to view leaf color along The Great River Road in northeast Iowa. As I started, a few poetic lines came to me. I interwove them with a Clergy Column for the local newspaper I wrote several years ago. I share, giving thanks for your wonderful exploration you called forward.
Ode to Autumn, a Poem
Looking into a book
Facing the leaves
Yet the face I see is you.
“There is something in the air,” we say, as we all identify this season of autumn as fall – when the leaves fall after turning crimson, bright orange, and those surprisingly lucent yellows; and the fruit falls that isn’t picked like apples are; and the harvest falls into place in terms of yield percentages and market prices as hopper cars and elevator silos fill up, sometimes to overflowing with the grain. This time of year calls to a side of our sensibility with crispness in the air, an earthy taste of squash, and the scent of wood fire smoke added as evening arrives. Both the mystery and implications of these are celebrated in bonfires and the kind of warm suppers prepared just to meet us at the end of a day. Who of us who knows this season between summer and winter doesn’t love the fall and miss it in climes where the distinctions between all the four seasons of a year are less pronounced?
We talk of “turning over a new leaf”
Speaking of springtime,
Autumn leaves turn color.
James Whitcomb Riley celebrated all this in a homey way with his poem, “When the Frost is on the Pumpkin.” And I remember the gloriously colored photographs in the Ideals magazine leafed through in the library. As well as the even more quaintly scenes depicted by Currier and Ives prints like the one that hung on the wall of my aunt and uncle’s farm house over their sofa. Yet there is more to fall than meets the eye. For there is something here that Gerard Manly Hopkins was getting at when he said, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” or better yet in his poem Pied Beauty which begins on the note of glory to God only to crescendo into praise!
If, with my face, I look
And your face I see
Who is forward looking? Who back?
You see, there is something ambiguous about autumn. Where does this by turns lovely, and mysterious, now haunting, then striking time of year take us? Was it already begun in late August? (Note the similarity between this word for a month and the one for this season.) Is it really over with the harvest? Or, does something else take place as the leaves turn color, the days get markedly shorter, and an overabundance of festivals appear on the calendars of churches and communities alike?
Green are the leaves turning over new life
Autumn leaves are green leaves turned
Color, word, act with fire.
We may think Homecoming, Oktoberfest, Halloween, Reformation Day, All Saint’s – but the truth is we are mixing things: ending and beginning, the joyful satisfaction of life’s ripe fruit with the mysterious sadness of death and change, and the compiling glory of our withdrawal to God’s heaven with the deepening of our return to the soil of God’s earth. In our surety and un-surety we dwell upon a rift that also presents us with an opening place of living promise, whether the season be spring, summer, winter, or fall. But perhaps no more especially, consciously so than in autumn, when the oldest and most steadfast aspect of God’s covenant is vividly shown us in fall colors: “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” – Genesis 8: 22, NRSV
Summer in Maryland is unbearable. The heat is blazing, the humidity ridiculously high. The first day of autumn weather was always a reprieve from hell.
Now living in North Carolina for a decade, after growing up outside LA, I've come to love the fall here more than any other season. The evergreen trees out west make the winter in the mountains gorgeous, but the color change in the South, especially in the Appalachians, is stunning in a way I couldn't have known without seeing it in person.
It's not as lofty as the poems reproduced above (nor is it a poem), but I've always been partial to Bradbury's opener to The October Country. I read it as a kid, and Bradbury excels at that youthful nostalgia, so now it's the bedrock of my autumnal consciousness:
“THE OCTOBER COUNTRY …that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…”
The mention of Border’s in this piece sounds its own autumnal note.
That Stevenson poem is, in fact, a work of genius, and I will not brook any word to the contrary.
You’ve hit on a lot of my own favorites here — though as a congeries of morbidities myself, I might have a kindlier word or two to say about the Baudelaire. My own introspective autumns are probably more Hardy than Keats.
Here’s a rather lovely poem by EA Robinson to add to the mix:
I remember this piece, & I like it now as I did then, but, God, how I hate autumn. I also hate winter. And I'm not terribly fond of spring. I could handle autumn in L.A., but I'm beneath the endlessly rainy skies of the Northeast—neither mellow nor mild.
I just taught the Keats—one thing it has that the other examples you adduce lack is lots of animals. And I take the liberty of appending a link to a thing I published not long ago on Rilke, in which I discuss various bad translations of "Autumn Day."
Very nice article. Of course, as the chance would have it, you have quoted as bad poetry a passage from the same Shelley’s poem I mentioned as one of my favourites in this very thread, but I already knew i was an easy prey for the more effusive poetry of the romantics.
Read your linked article — very enjoyable. Pretty much sums up my feelings as well. Weird Rilke I like. Vatic Rilke not so much. I haven’t read your own poetry — I’ll have to get on that.
It is a rare gift. Prof Robbins brings up Shelley as a comparison, but PB has many truly chimerical productions, perfectly pitched midway between sublime and ridiculous. Which explains his shifting critical reputation. But my preference for one (Shelley) over the other may just be bias of the mother tongue.
Well, Shelley is Shelley. You take the bad with the good because the former enables the latter. I put him in the first of the new poems I'm working on, just published in the Brooklyn Rail. Given the subject matter I forbear to link.
Come out to Hawaii. After a number of years, the eternal perfection of the weather has become anodyne, almost numbing. I miss autumn’s edge and the cold bite of winter. It feels as though important parts of my imaginative palette have gone missing.
I also thought about your article, which I learned a lot from (as always). Lucretius as inaugurating figure in romantic landscape poetry -- who would have thought? The bit about Vertumnus was interesting as well. (I know him mostly as the famous bloke with cherry lips in the painting by Arcimboldo.)
I've always loved the changing of seasons in New York. There has alway been quite a variety of Trees for the season to mutate where I've lived. There is a barrier Island along the south shore of Long Island some ways away from me so thin they dont allow cars say only for some emergency and maintenance vehicles. I've visited twice or thrice in summers past. Called Fire Island. As to why it has such a blazing title. No one seems to know. I've heard many stories that its due to travelers lighting campfires. Or the way it looked from the view of planes. Or any other story etc etc. but my favorite and the one ive most oft heard is that in fall the crimson leaves give the whole island a hue of flame. I should visit in the near future. Thanks for the poems
I am the Autumnal Sun
Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature
— not his Father but his Mother stirs
within him, and he becomes immortal with her
immortality. From time to time she claims
kindredship with us, and some globule
from her veins steals up into our own.
I am the autumnal sun,
With autumn gales my race is run;
When will the hazel put forth its flowers,
Or the grape ripen under my bowers?
When will the harvest or the hunter's moon
Turn my midnight into mid-noon?
I am all sere and yellow,
And to my core mellow.
The mast is dropping within my woods,
The winter is lurking within my moods,
And the rustling of the withered leaf
Is the constant music of my grief…
-Thoreau
This Dickens poem is in our kids’ poetry anthology and I love the end of the first stanza.
'Tis pleasant on a fine spring morn
To see the buds expand,
'Tis pleasant in the summer time
To see the fruitful land;
'Tis pleasant on a winter's night
To sit around the blaze,
But what are joys like these, my boys,
To merry autumn days!
We hail the merry Autumn days,
When leaves are turning red;
Because they're far more beautiful
Than anyone has said,
We hail the merry harvest time,
The gayest of the year;
The time of rich and bounteous crops,
Rejoicing and good cheer.
I am on a brief road trip to view leaf color along The Great River Road in northeast Iowa. As I started, a few poetic lines came to me. I interwove them with a Clergy Column for the local newspaper I wrote several years ago. I share, giving thanks for your wonderful exploration you called forward.
Ode to Autumn, a Poem
Looking into a book
Facing the leaves
Yet the face I see is you.
“There is something in the air,” we say, as we all identify this season of autumn as fall – when the leaves fall after turning crimson, bright orange, and those surprisingly lucent yellows; and the fruit falls that isn’t picked like apples are; and the harvest falls into place in terms of yield percentages and market prices as hopper cars and elevator silos fill up, sometimes to overflowing with the grain. This time of year calls to a side of our sensibility with crispness in the air, an earthy taste of squash, and the scent of wood fire smoke added as evening arrives. Both the mystery and implications of these are celebrated in bonfires and the kind of warm suppers prepared just to meet us at the end of a day. Who of us who knows this season between summer and winter doesn’t love the fall and miss it in climes where the distinctions between all the four seasons of a year are less pronounced?
We talk of “turning over a new leaf”
Speaking of springtime,
Autumn leaves turn color.
James Whitcomb Riley celebrated all this in a homey way with his poem, “When the Frost is on the Pumpkin.” And I remember the gloriously colored photographs in the Ideals magazine leafed through in the library. As well as the even more quaintly scenes depicted by Currier and Ives prints like the one that hung on the wall of my aunt and uncle’s farm house over their sofa. Yet there is more to fall than meets the eye. For there is something here that Gerard Manly Hopkins was getting at when he said, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” or better yet in his poem Pied Beauty which begins on the note of glory to God only to crescendo into praise!
If, with my face, I look
And your face I see
Who is forward looking? Who back?
You see, there is something ambiguous about autumn. Where does this by turns lovely, and mysterious, now haunting, then striking time of year take us? Was it already begun in late August? (Note the similarity between this word for a month and the one for this season.) Is it really over with the harvest? Or, does something else take place as the leaves turn color, the days get markedly shorter, and an overabundance of festivals appear on the calendars of churches and communities alike?
Green are the leaves turning over new life
Autumn leaves are green leaves turned
Color, word, act with fire.
We may think Homecoming, Oktoberfest, Halloween, Reformation Day, All Saint’s – but the truth is we are mixing things: ending and beginning, the joyful satisfaction of life’s ripe fruit with the mysterious sadness of death and change, and the compiling glory of our withdrawal to God’s heaven with the deepening of our return to the soil of God’s earth. In our surety and un-surety we dwell upon a rift that also presents us with an opening place of living promise, whether the season be spring, summer, winter, or fall. But perhaps no more especially, consciously so than in autumn, when the oldest and most steadfast aspect of God’s covenant is vividly shown us in fall colors: “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” – Genesis 8: 22, NRSV
To face poetry forward
The world is called in turn
A poem.
These wrought rhapsodies of Autumn sound in my blind spot
The onslaught of Fall signals the season of rot.
I love autumn. All the seasons I love, but autumn the best. It is pregnant with a new beginning, and it’s just wonderfully beautiful.
“…the sun knoweth his going down. Thou makest darkness that it may be night; O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all…”
“No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better.”
Did you really enjoy the end of summer vacation so much:)? I am now near my fifties and I still remember this deep state of unhappiness.
Summer in Maryland is unbearable. The heat is blazing, the humidity ridiculously high. The first day of autumn weather was always a reprieve from hell.
I don't mind it. "A time for everything under the Sun" and all.
Now living in North Carolina for a decade, after growing up outside LA, I've come to love the fall here more than any other season. The evergreen trees out west make the winter in the mountains gorgeous, but the color change in the South, especially in the Appalachians, is stunning in a way I couldn't have known without seeing it in person.
It's not as lofty as the poems reproduced above (nor is it a poem), but I've always been partial to Bradbury's opener to The October Country. I read it as a kid, and Bradbury excels at that youthful nostalgia, so now it's the bedrock of my autumnal consciousness:
“THE OCTOBER COUNTRY …that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…”
I loved that book when I was a kid. The early Bradbury of the eerie tales is hard to resist.
The mention of Border’s in this piece sounds its own autumnal note.
That Stevenson poem is, in fact, a work of genius, and I will not brook any word to the contrary.
You’ve hit on a lot of my own favorites here — though as a congeries of morbidities myself, I might have a kindlier word or two to say about the Baudelaire. My own introspective autumns are probably more Hardy than Keats.
Here’s a rather lovely poem by EA Robinson to add to the mix:
https://poets.org/poem/sheaves
It seems like almost every great poet in every country has tried his hand on this subject. Pushkin also has a poem literally titled "Autumn".
Speaking of poems of autumnal variety, I am also partial to Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind".
Of course.
http://literaryjoint.blogspot.nl/2012/10/ottobre-vincenzo-cardarelli-october-by.html
This reminds me of Leopardi!
I remember this piece, & I like it now as I did then, but, God, how I hate autumn. I also hate winter. And I'm not terribly fond of spring. I could handle autumn in L.A., but I'm beneath the endlessly rainy skies of the Northeast—neither mellow nor mild.
I just taught the Keats—one thing it has that the other examples you adduce lack is lots of animals. And I take the liberty of appending a link to a thing I published not long ago on Rilke, in which I discuss various bad translations of "Autumn Day."
https://books.substack.com/p/diary-michael-robbins-on-rilke
You know, you’re in imminent peril of turning into your own caricature.
Very nice article. Of course, as the chance would have it, you have quoted as bad poetry a passage from the same Shelley’s poem I mentioned as one of my favourites in this very thread, but I already knew i was an easy prey for the more effusive poetry of the romantics.
Shelley was Shelley, he was entire.
Read your linked article — very enjoyable. Pretty much sums up my feelings as well. Weird Rilke I like. Vatic Rilke not so much. I haven’t read your own poetry — I’ll have to get on that.
Rilke had a rare gift for either being truly great or truly ridiculous, but almost never anything in between.
It is a rare gift. Prof Robbins brings up Shelley as a comparison, but PB has many truly chimerical productions, perfectly pitched midway between sublime and ridiculous. Which explains his shifting critical reputation. But my preference for one (Shelley) over the other may just be bias of the mother tongue.
Well, Shelley is Shelley. You take the bad with the good because the former enables the latter. I put him in the first of the new poems I'm working on, just published in the Brooklyn Rail. Given the subject matter I forbear to link.
A similar thing happened to me when I bumped into Shelley outside the taqueria.
Something funny happened to Shelley on the way to the Forum.
Come out to Hawaii. After a number of years, the eternal perfection of the weather has become anodyne, almost numbing. I miss autumn’s edge and the cold bite of winter. It feels as though important parts of my imaginative palette have gone missing.
Alas, academics cannot choose where to live.
At least they can choose what to teach. Sometimes. Maybe.
Vertumnus benedicat te—aut salted Christus sub specie Vertumni.
Salted?
Autocorrect—should have been saltem
Yeah, I got it.
Incidentally, I had never seen this piece of yours, but I’ll go link to it on the one I wrote in late September on autumn in Roman poetry.
I also thought about your article, which I learned a lot from (as always). Lucretius as inaugurating figure in romantic landscape poetry -- who would have thought? The bit about Vertumnus was interesting as well. (I know him mostly as the famous bloke with cherry lips in the painting by Arcimboldo.)
But I mean, also, the thing of your choice salted.
Of course.
well if the body of christ isnt salted with fire how else are we supposed to wolf it down?
Either a clever play of metaphors or n inexcusable blasphemy (I'll get back to you if I figure out which).
I sit in the stand awaiting your judgment.
I've always loved the changing of seasons in New York. There has alway been quite a variety of Trees for the season to mutate where I've lived. There is a barrier Island along the south shore of Long Island some ways away from me so thin they dont allow cars say only for some emergency and maintenance vehicles. I've visited twice or thrice in summers past. Called Fire Island. As to why it has such a blazing title. No one seems to know. I've heard many stories that its due to travelers lighting campfires. Or the way it looked from the view of planes. Or any other story etc etc. but my favorite and the one ive most oft heard is that in fall the crimson leaves give the whole island a hue of flame. I should visit in the near future. Thanks for the poems