Autumn/ falling
Autumn has its own poetic tradition. Keats’ ode ‘To Autumn’ shows us why: ‘thou hast thy music too’, a particularly stirring kind. ‘Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn/ Among the river sallows, borne aloft/ Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies’. Sinking and falling are more interesting to the melancholic poet than loftiness, that mawkish Augustan paradigm. Since Alexander Pope mocked the Icarian failure of poetry which aims for sublimity, poets have preferred to sing of their own sinking1. Alice Oswald recently said that poetry is the ‘art of speechlessness’; in that case, perfecting the art is more easily done than it was in the age of Dryden, when poets took it upon themselves to solve the problem of evil or the matter of post-Reformation ecclesial authority, all while hardly dropping a foot. Since Milton, the fall of man has seemed more poetic than redemption — Paradise Lost > Paradise Regain’d — and one is certainly more easily enacted than the other.
The easy power of an autumnal memento mori probably accounts for the preponderance of great autumn poems as opposed to, say, summer ones. Last year I made a little anthology for some friends because they, being Catholic, enjoy reminders of mortality. Here are some of my favourites (not all of which are about autumn but all of which involve it):
A. R. Ammons, ‘Strolls’
The brook gives me
sparkles plenty, an
abundance, but asks
nothing of me:
snow thickets
and scrawny
snowwork of hedgerows,
still gold weeds, and
snow-bent cedar gatherings
provide
feasts of disposition
(figure, color, weight, proportion)
and require
nothing of me,
not even that I notice: the near-winter
quartermoon
sliding high almost
into color at four-thirty –
the abundance of clarity
along the rose ridge line!
alone, I’m not alone:
a standoffishness and reasonableness
in things finds
me or I find that
in them: sand, fall, furrow, bluff –
things one, speaking things
not words, would
have found to say.
‘Speaking things not words’: an impossible desire which disillusioned Plato of poetry. Autumn is about impossible desire, like the desire not to mind the darkness at four-thirty.
Wallace Stevens, ‘Autumn Refrain’
The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone … the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never—shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness that comes to me out of this, beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never—shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.
Very like Hopkins. The poem is mimetic of autumnal restlessness, the futility of restlessness in the still night!
W. H. Auden, ‘The Fall of Rome’
(for Cyril Connolly)
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
In the autumn of the Roman Empire, the gods have absconded.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Spring and Fall’
To a young child
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Had to be included. I love the monosyllables ‘And yet you wíll weep and know why’.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Postscript’
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
‘Postscript’ is in a class of its own. It is less typically autumnal than the others: invigorating, full of light. Still, it is liminal, ‘caught between’.
From Geoffrey Hill, ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’
1. QUAINT MAZES
And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.On blustery lilac-bush and terrace-urn
bedaubed with bloom Linnaean pentecosts
put their pronged light; the chilly fountains burn.
Religion of the heart, with trysts and questsand pangs of consolation, its hawk’s hood
twitched off for sweet carnality, again
rejoices in old hymns of servitude,haunting the sacred well, the hidden shrine.
It is the ravage of the heron wood;
it is the rood blazing upon the green.2. DAMON’S LAMENT FOR HIS CLORINDA, YORKSHIRE 1654
November rips gold foil from the oak ridges.
Dour folk huddle in High Hoyland, Penistone.
The tributaries of the Sheaf and Don
bulge their dull spate, cramming the poor bridges.The North Sea batters our shepherds’ cottages
from sixty miles. No sooner has the sun
swung clear above earth’s rim than it is gone.
We live like gleaners of its vestigesknowing we flourish, though each year a child
with the set face of a tomb-weeper is put down
for ever and ever. Why does the air grow coldin the region of mirrors? And who is this clown
doffing his mask at the masked threshold
to selfless raptures that are all his own?
The poem is an elegy on the Gothic revival (what is more autumnal than a dead revival?), a lament of fallenness, an advent awaiting nothing but the Christ-less rood.
See Pope, ‘Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry’. So much poetry is about the impossibility of reaching sublime heights or falling from heights already reached, but not all: see Abraham Cowley’s imitation of Mathias Casimirus Sarbievius’ ode 2.5: ‘The Extasie’. I once wrote a poem about going very high up. The descent doesn’t happen in the poem, leaving the hot-air balloonist suspended forever: https://www.oriel.ox.ac.uk/eugene-lee-hamilton-poetry-competition/2020-eugene-lee-hamilton-winning-poem/