Unseen by men's eyes,
the colored leaves have scattered
deep in the mountains:
truly we may say brocade
worn in the darkness of night!
Ki no Tsurayuki (c. 872-945) (translated by Helen Craig McCullough), in Helen Craig McCullough (editor), Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (Stanford University Press 1985), page 73.
A brocade of leaves. Yes, let the autumn poems come as they may, and fall in random patterns! That being said, I do have three touchstones that call to me each year. The following poem invariably arrives with the season's first whispers:
The Cranes
The western wind has blown but a few days;
Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.
On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;
In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.
Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;
Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.
In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,
The garden-boy is leading the cranes home.
Po Chü-i (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, More Translations from the Chinese (George Allen & Unwin 1919), page 57.
Those beguiling tell-tale hints of autumn: tentative, lovely. Inexorable.
Unable to sleep in the pre-dawn hours of the seventh of September, listening to a lone robin singing in the darkness, Edward Thomas later wrote this:
"Gradually I became conscious of nothing but the moan of trees, the monotonous expressionless robin's song, the slightly aching body to which I was, by ties more and more slender, attached. I felt, I knew, I did not think that there would always be an unknown player, always wind and trees, always a robin singing, always a listener listening in the stark dawn: and I knew also that if I were the listener I should not always lie thus in a safe warm bed thinking myself alive. . . . And so I fell asleep again on the seventh of September."
Edward Thomas, from "Insomnia," in The Last Sheaf (Jonathan Cape 1928), page 43. The ellipses appear in the original text. Thomas was most likely writing of the early morning of September 7, 1913. (Judy Kendall, Edward Thomas: The Origins of His Poetry (University of Wales Press 2012), pages 40-41.)
Samuel Sherwin (1846-1935)
"First Touch of Autumn, Rowditch, Derby" (c. 1917)
Of course, autumn would not be autumn without Thomas Hardy, would it? And thus each year I return to this:
Autumn in King's Hintock Park
Here by the baring bough
Raking up leaves,
Often I ponder how
Springtime deceives, —
I, an old woman now,
Raking up leaves.
Here in the avenue
Raking up leaves,
Lords' ladies pass in view,
Until one heaves
Sighs at life's russet hue,
Raking up leaves!
Just as my shape you see
Raking up leaves,
I saw, when fresh and free,
Those memory weaves
Into grey ghosts by me,
Raking up leaves.
Yet, Dear, though one may sigh,
Raking up leaves,
New leaves will dance on high —
Earth never grieves! —
Will not, when missed am I
Raking up leaves.
Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (Macmillan 1909).
Very little escaped Hardy's notice. After the poem was published in The Daily Mail on November 17, 1906, he wrote to a friend: "I happened to be walking, or cycling, through [the park] years ago, when the incident occurred on which the verses are based, and I wrote them out." (J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (University of North Carolina Press 1970), page 207.) The park was located near the village of Melbury Osmund in Dorset.
"Earth never grieves!" Something to bear in mind when considering a meditation by Edward Thomas on autumn.
"The scent is that of wood-smoke, of fruit and of some fallen leaves. This is the beginning of the pageant of autumn, of that gradual pompous dying which has no parallel in human life yet draws us to it with sure bonds. It is a dying of the flesh, and we see it pass through a kind of beauty which we can only call spiritual, of so high and inaccessible a strangeness is it. The sight of such perfection as is many times achieved before the end awakens the never more than lightly sleeping human desire of permanence. Now, now is the hour; let things be thus; thus for ever; there is nothing further to be thought of; let these remain. And yet we have a premonition that remain they must not for more than a little while. The motion of the autumn is a fall, a surrender, requiring no effort, and therefore the mind cannot long be blind to the cycle of things as in the spring it can when the effort and delight of ascension veils the goal and the decline beyond."
Edward Thomas, The South Country (J. M. Dent 1909), page 272.
William Samuel Jay (1843-1933)
"At the Fall of Leaf, Arundel Park, Sussex" (1883)
My third autumn perennial is by Derek Mahon. Given that he passed away at the beginning of this month, my visit to it this year comes with sadness. Yet, we never lose the poets who move us, do we? I have been living with this poem (and with many others by him) for years, and that will never change.
Leaves
The prisoners of infinite choice
Have built their house
In a field below the wood
And are at peace.
It is autumn, and dead leaves
On their way to the river
Scratch like birds at the windows
Or tick on the road.
Somewhere there is an afterlife
Of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing.
Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have led
Have found their own fulfilment.
Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford University Press 1975).
Just a few weeks ago, when the day was windy the trees still made the sound of the sea, green billows and swells swaying overhead. Now, a strong breeze brings only a dry rustling, a rattling and scraping of individual leaves, each hold-out with its own voice. In a dwindling choir.
"In November I returned for a day to a lonely cottage which I had known in the summer, and all its poppies were gone. Here and there, in the garden, could be found a violet, a primrose, a wood sorrel, flowering; the forget-me-nots and columbines had multiplied and their leaves were dense in the borders; the broad row of cabbages gleamed blue in a brief angry light after rain; the black-currant leaves were of pure, translucent amber at the ends of the branches. In the little copses the oaks made golden islands in the lakes of leafless ash, and the world was very little in a lasting mist.
* * * * *
It is a commonplace that each one of us is alone, that every piece of ground where a man stands is a desert island with footprints of unknown creatures all round its shore. Once or twice in a life we cry out that we know the footprints; we even see the boats of the strangers putting out from the shore; we detect a neighbouring island through the haze, and creatures of like bearing to ourselves moving there. On that night a high tide had washed every footprint away, and we were satisfied, raising not a languid telescope to the horizon, nor even studying the sands at our feet."
Edward Thomas, from "St. Martin's Summer," in The Heart of England (J. M. Dent 1906), pages 131-132.
Donald Floyd (1892-1965), "The Wye Valley below Wynd Cliff"
