Autumn Poem
Since I couldn't find a poem that captured my feeling that fall is the best of the seasons, I wrote one myself:
Out of the blazing heat of summer
--Stark white light bleaching out colours
Flattening the dusty view
The dull, insect-humming quiet
Broken only by thunderstorms--
Comes, like moth from chrysalis
The Autumn
Colour throbbing rich and moist
(Until branches are bare)
Gentle rains
Clear vivid light
In the declining hours of day
I say:
Autumn is as beautiful
Hopeful and melancholy
As human life
Compare and contrast:
Mother, Summer, I
by Philip Larkin
My mother, who hates thunder storms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;
But when the August weather breaks
And rains begin, and brittle frost
Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,
Her worried summer look is lost,
And I her son, though summer-born
And summer-loving, none the less
Am easier when the leaves are gone
Too often summer days appear
Emblems of perfect happiness
I can't confront: I must await
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:
An autumn more appropriate.
Autumn Daybreak
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Cold wind of autumn, blowing loud
At dawn, a fortnight overdue,
Jostling the doors, and tearing through
My bedroom to rejoin the cloud,
I know--for I can hear the hiss
And scrape of leaves along the floor--
How may boughs, lashed bare by this,
Will rake the cluttered sky once more.
Tardy, and somewhat south of east,
The sun will rise at length, made known
More by the meagre light increased
Than by a disk in splendour shown;
When, having but to turn my head,
Through the stripped maple I shall see,
Bleak and remembered, patched with red,
The hill all summer hid from me.
Second April (The Death of Autumn)
Edna St. Vincent Millay
When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,
And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind
Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned
Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes,
Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak,
Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,--
Then leans on me the weight of the year, and crushes
My heart. I know that Beauty must ail and die,
And will be born again,--but ah, to see
Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!
Oh, Autumn! Autumn!--What is the Spring to me?
Larkin comes to a kind of gruding acceptance of fall--summer, it turns out, is too perfect, or it demands too much. I think part of the meaning of the word "autumnal" is resignation to less-than-perfection, middle age, mortality: mediocrity? For his mother (and perhaps he doesn't remember her when she was young) summer is just too stressful--autumn is a relief.
The first Millay poem seems to be all about sadness and loss--being able to see a hill that was hidden by leaves hardly seems much compensation.
The second Millay poem seems to have a twist ending. Does she truly look forward to Spring, the new birth of Beauty, or not? Maybe she has fallen in love with specific beautiful things, including people, and when they die they cannot be reproduced--only replaced.
I'm not sure I've succeeded in making fall a positive thing. "moth" from chrsyalis sounds like something gray--although of course there are some lovely moths. Let's face it, there is both decline and melancholy in there. Is it a sign of middle age to welcome the fall?
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