Greetings
Everyone!
It is September, the first month of autumn—my favorite season!
John Keats, the
great English poet, wrote a poem “To Autumn” where he celebrates the season,
picturing autumn personified as a beautiful, witch-like woman with her hair lifted
by the wind, drowsy with the “fume of poppies” as she watches the ripening
orchards, the harvesting of corn and the operation of a cider press.
The final stanza takes us up into the skies, away from the woman and her earthly concerns:
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 bourne;
Hedge-crickets
sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast
whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering
swallows twitter in the skies.
The movement is
from the stubble-plains lit by the rosy light of sunset to the river and then
to the hills and finally to the emptiness of the autumn sky. The music of autumn speaks of death and
nothingness—i.e. the “soft-dying day,” the “wailful choir,” the gnats mourning,
the sinking of the wind that “dies.”
JLS
