Compensations, Revisited

In a recent post, I suggested that autumn's losses are accompanied by compensations.  One of those compensations is the sound of empty trees. The other day I walked down an avenue of mostly leafless trees -- only a few stragglers remained, most of them, curiously, out on the tips of branches.

The day was breezy.  The trunks creaked, as I imagine the masts of a wooden ship might creak in a wind.  Higher up, the empty branches clacked and clattered against each other.  To borrow from Wallace Stevens's "The Region November":  the trees seemed to be "saying and saying."  But not, alas, in any known language.  Which is not to say that communication is wholly impossible.

The fairy tale atmosphere of James Elroy Flecker's "November Eves" and Louis MacNeice's "The Riddle" may be apt as well.  As may be the following poem by Thomas Hardy.

                                    Emily Carr, "Inside a Forest" (c. 1935)

             Night-Time in Mid-Fall

It is a storm-strid night, winds footing swift

          Through the blind profound;

     I know the happenings from their sound;

Leaves totter down still green, and spin and drift;

The tree-trunks rock to their roots, which wrench and lift

The loam where they run onward underground.

The streams are muddy and swollen; eels migrate

          To a new abode;

     Even cross, 'tis said, the turnpike-road;

(Men's feet have felt their crawl, home-coming late):

The westward fronts of towers are saturate,

Church-timbers crack, and witches ride abroad.

Thomas Hardy, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925).

                                          Emily Carr, "Clearing" (1942)