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 sinking
Autumn/ falling
Autumn/ falling
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 sinking