Autumn Into Winter

As I have mentioned here in the past, each day I read a poem in the morning and a poem in the evening.  This was today's morning poem:

                                   Autumn Ends

Lost in vacant wonder at how the months flow away in silence,

I sit alone in my idle hut, thinking endless thoughts.

An old man's cares, like these leaves, are hard to sweep away.

To the sound of their rustling I see autumn off once again.

Tate Ryūwan (1762-1844) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor), Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets (North Point Press 1990), page 117.  A kanshi (a Japanese word meaning "Chinese poem") is a poem written in Chinese by a Japanese poet, following the strict rules of Chinese prosody.  (For a discussion of kanshi, please see my post of November 2, 2014.)  

I have read "Autumn Ends" several times in the past, but I hadn't revisited it recently.  This morning, I came upon it while browsing through Watson's anthology, which is one of my favorite books.  After reading the poem, it occurred to me: isn't today the day of the winter solstice, or was it yesterday, or is it tomorrow?  I checked: it is indeed today.  Reading poetry tends to put one in the way of serendipity.

But, beyond this nice bit of happenstance, I realized that, with each passing year, "Autumn Ends" seems more and more apt.  Something along these lines: "In a lifetime, how many springs do we see?"  (Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), "Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade.")  Or this: "the years just flow by like a broken-down dam."  (John Prine, "Angel from Montgomery.")  Ah, well, no help for it.

John Milne Donald (1819-1866), "Autumn Leaves" (1864)

As I am wont to say: "In poetry, one thing leads to another."  Thus, not surprisingly, my favorite autumn poem came to mind soon after I read "Autumn Ends" this morning.  The poem usually appears here each autumn, but this year it makes its appearance on the first day of winter.

                   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), page 3.

It is lovely to find "rustling" leaves in both "Autumn Ends" and "Leaves."  It is those rustling leaves that follow us on our autumn walks -- dogging our footsteps -- that capture the heart of autumn.  And Mahon takes things a beautiful step further: "It is autumn, and dead leaves/On their way to the river/Scratch like birds at the windows/Or tick on the road."

George Vicat Cole (1833-1893), "Autumn Morning" (1891)

Today I went for my daily late afternoon walk, both poems still on my mind.  After intermittent rain, often heavy, in the morning, the sky overhead and to the west was clearing: a mix of blue, gold, pink, and orange.  The sun was on its way to disappearing beyond the waters of Puget Sound, beyond the Olympic Mountains, off into the Pacific.  Not a bad way to bring autumn to a close, to enter winter.

The ground remains strewn with all of those rustling leaves.  But the sparrows, our companions throughout the winter, were lively, sporting in the remaining sunlight.  Of course, they know what the fallen rustling leaves are telling us.  But they go on being their sparrow selves.

After seeing them twittering and flitting in the bushes and on the green meadow grass, I thought of this:

                        The Bamboo Sparrow

Doesn't peck up millet from the government storehouse,

Doesn't bore holes through the master's house;

It dwells a lifetime in the mountain groves

And roosts at nightfall on a branch of bamboo.

Gido Shūshin (1325-1388) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury (editor), Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan 1992), page 68.  "The Bamboo Sparrow," like "Autumn Ends," is a kanshi.

Alexander Docharty (1862-1940), "An Autumn Day" (1917)

I returned from my walk.  I have not yet read my poem for the evening.  However -- again, one poem leading to another -- I thought of this tonight: 

          The River

Stir not, whisper not,

Trouble not the giver

Of quiet who gives

This calm-flowing river,

Whose whispering willows,

Whose murmuring reeds

Make silence more still

Than the thought it breeds,

Until thought drops down

From the motionless mind

Like a quiet brown leaf

Without any wind;

It falls on the river

And floats with its flowing,

Unhurrying still

Past caring, past knowing.

Ask not, answer not,

Trouble not the giver

Of quiet who gives

This calm-flowing river.

Patrick MacDonogh (1902-1961), Poems (edited by Derek Mahon) (The Gallery Press 2001), page 86.

Rustling leaves.  Sparrows.  Autumn into winter.  The river.

William Samuel Jay (1843-1933)

"At the Fall of Leaf, Arundel Park, Sussex" (1883)

No Grieving

Most of the leaves have fallen.  One day last week -- a proverbial "brilliant autumn day" -- I walked past a grove of big-leaf maples bordering a small glade.  The ground beneath the maples was covered with red, russet, and yellow leaves.  There was no wind.  Now and then, a few of the remaining leaves drifted down.  Each one made a soft tick as it landed on the dry, deep leaf-carpet.

     People are few;

A leaf falls here,

     Falls there.

Issa (1763-1828) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 364.

A single leaf falls in a sunlight-pierced, shadowed grove, joining its predecessors.  I cannot help but return to the lines from Yeats which appeared in my most recent post: ". . . and the yellow leaves/Fell like faint meteors in the gloom."  (W. B. Yeats, "Ephemera.")  There is something to be said for waning autumn.

     Leaves falling,

Lie one on another;

     The rain beats on the rain.

Gyōdai (1732-1793) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter, page 365.

The haiku by Issa and Gyōdai are statements of fact.  Lovely statements of fact.  Records of two evanescent moments made by two evanescent human beings.  But there is much more afoot.  "The real nature of each thing, and more so, of all things, is a poetical one. . . . Haiku shows us what we knew all the time, but did not know we knew; it shows us that we are poets in so far as we live at all."  (R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture (Hokuseido Press 1949), page x.)  

And this:

"In old-fashioned novels, we often have the situation of a man or a woman who realizes only at the end of the book, and usually when it is too late, who it was that he or she had loved for many years without knowing it.  So a great many haiku tell us something that we have seen but not seen.  They do not give us a satori, an enlightenment; they show us that we have had an enlightenment, had it often, -- and not recognized it."

R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 322 (the italics are in the original text).

In noting that Issa's and Gyōdai's haiku are "statements of fact," I am not suggesting that the poems are emotionless observations, devoid of feeling.  Any fine haiku is an embodiment of kokoro, a Japanese word (based on the Chinese character for the Chinese word xin) which can mean "heart," "mind," or "spirit" or, in certain contexts, all three of them at once: heart-mind-spirit.  Thus, the distinctive melancholy of autumn inhabits both of the two haiku: that combination of heartbreaking beauty and resigned acceptance each of us knows so well.  

Alexander Jamieson (1873-1937)

"The Old Mill, Weston Turville" (1927)

Autumn's particular form of melancholy is, not surprisingly, present in my favorite autumnal poem by Thomas Hardy.  As is so often the case (at least for me) when reading Hardy's poetry, the poem contains a line which, once encountered, stays with you for a lifetime.

   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).  Hardy added the subscript "1901" at the bottom of the poem. The date may be put into context by Hardy's comment on the poem in a letter he wrote to a friend in December of 1906: "I happened to be walking, or cycling, through [the park] years ago, when the incident occurred on which the verses are based."  (J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (University of North Carolina Press 1970), page 207.) 

"Earth never grieves!"  This is the line that has stayed with me for several decades.  Years after having first come across it, I was delighted to discover this passage in a letter written by Philip Larkin to Monica Jones, his long-time companion: "Earth never grieves, I thought, walking across the park, watching seagulls cruising greedily above the ground looking for heaven knows what.  Don't you think it's a good line?  A very good line."  (Philip Larkin, letter to Monica Jones (January 29, 1958), in Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica (edited by Anthony Thwaite) (Faber and Faber 2010), page 235.)  I also heartily agree with another comment made by Larkin relating to Hardy (which has appeared here on more than one occasion): "[M]ay I trumpet the assurance that one reader at least would not wish Hardy's Collected Poems a single page shorter, and regards it as many times over the best body of poetic work this century so far has to show?"  (Philip Larkin, "Wanted: Good Hardy Critic" (1966), in Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (Faber and Faber 1983), page 174.)  Larkin's comment was correct at the time he wrote it in 1966.  It remains correct.

[A side-note.  Hardy's comment on the source of "Autumn in King's Hintock Park" brings to mind a statement attributed to him in The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (a biography which was ascribed to his wife, Florence Hardy, when it was first published, but which was actually written mostly by Hardy): "I believe it would be said by people who knew me well that I have a faculty (possibly not uncommon) for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred."  (Thomas Hardy and Florence Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (edited by Michael Millgate) (Macmillan 1985), page 408.)  These lines from one of Hardy's poems come to mind: "O the regrettings infinite/When the night-processions flit/Through the mind!"  (Thomas Hardy, "The Peace-Offering.")  We each have our own "regrettings infinite" and flitting "night-processions," don't we?

A poem about Hardy by Siegfried Sassoon, who often visited Hardy at his home in Dorset, provides an evocative glimpse of Hardy and his haunting, ever-present past.

                     At Max Gate

Old Mr. Hardy, upright in his chair,

Courteous to visiting acquaintance chatted

With unaloof alertness while he patted

The sheep dog whose society he preferred.

He wore an air of never having heard

That there was much that needed putting right.

Hardy, the Wessex wizard, wasn't there.

Good care was taken to keep him out of sight.

Head propped on hand, he sat with me alone,

Silent, the log fire flickering on his face.

Here was the seer whose words the world had known.

Someone had taken Mr. Hardy's place.

Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems: 1908-1956 (Faber and Faber 1961).  "Max Gate" was the name of Hardy's home in Dorchester.  The younger poets of Hardy's time often tended to make their way to Hardy in his later years.  For instance, in addition to Sassoon, Walter de la Mare and Edmund Blunden became his friends, and were invited for visits.  Like Sassoon, both of them wrote poems about Hardy.]

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "A City Garden" (1940)

"Earth never grieves!"  As for us, there is no escape from grief and grieving, is there?  This is neither a complaint nor a lament.  Grief and grieving are part and parcel of the beauty of the World.  What can one do?  Continue to pay attention to the beautiful particulars of the World.  Above all else, remain grateful.

When I was young, not knowing the taste of grief,

I loved to climb the storied tower,

loved to climb the storied tower,

and in my new songs I'd make it a point to speak of grief.

But now I know all about the taste of grief.

About to speak of it, I stop;

about to speak of it, I stop

and say instead, "Days so cool -- what a lovely autumn!"

Hsin Ch'i-chi (1140-1207) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 371. The poem is untitled.

"Days so cool -- what a lovely autumn!"  One can only hope to find the equanimity of Hsin Ch'i-chi.  Or the equanimity (and the beauty and truth) of this:

"Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless?  To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring -- these are even more deeply moving.  Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration. Are poems written on such themes as 'Going to view the cherry blossoms only to find they had scattered' or 'On being prevented from visiting the blossoms' inferior to those on 'Seeing the blossoms'? People commonly regret that the cherry blossoms scatter or that the moon sinks in the sky, and this is natural; but only an exceptionally insensitive man would say, 'This branch and that branch have lost their blossoms.  There is nothing worth seeing now.'

"In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting.  Does the love between men and women refer only to the moments when they are in each other's arms?  The man who grieves over a love affair broken off before it was fulfilled, who bewails empty vows, who spends long autumn nights alone, who lets his thoughts wander to distant skies, who yearns for the past in a dilapidated house -- such a man truly knows what love means."

Kenkō (1283-1350) (translated by Donald Keene), Tsurezuregusa, Chapter 137, in Donald Keene (editor), Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (Columbia University Press 1967), pages 115 and 118.

James Paterson (1854-1932), "Moniaive" (1885)

After all my long-windedness, I find myself returning once again to my favorite poem of autumn.  (For which I beg the forbearance of long-time -- and much-appreciated! -- readers of this blog.)

                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).

Come to think of it, "Leaves" has something to say about grieving, equanimity, and beauty.

As does this:

The wind has brought

     enough fallen leaves

To make a fire.

Ryōkan (translated by John Stevens), in John Stevens, One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan (Weatherhill 1977), page 67.

Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979)

"Burdens Farm, with Melbury Beacon" (1943)

September

Once again, September.  The past few weeks, the afternoons have sometimes been as warm as midsummer.  But the leaves -- ah, the leaves: green going to gold, and to brown, amber, orange, and red. Fallen, falling, ready to fall.  Before long, they will "Scratch like birds at the windows/Or tick on the road."  (Derek Mahon, "Leaves.")  Not quite yet.  And where have the swallows gone?

Speaking of Derek Mahon, I recently realized that I have been remiss: it has been a few years since we last visited my favorite September poem.

     September in Great Yarmouth

The woodwind whistles down the shore

Piping the stragglers home; the gulls

Snaffle and bolt their final mouthfuls.

Only the youngsters call for more.

Chimneys breathe and beaches empty,

Everyone queues for the inland cold --

Middle-aged parents growing old

And teenage kids becoming twenty.

Now the first few spots of rain 

Spatter the sports page in the gutter.

Council workmen stab the litter.

You have sown and reaped; now sow again.

The band packs in, the banners drop,

The ice-cream stiffens in its cone.

The boatman lifts his megaphone:

'Come in, fifteen, your time is up.'

Derek Mahon, Poems, 1962-1978 (Oxford University Press 1979).

Reginald Brundrit (1883-1960), "The River" (c. 1924)

Late September, and the green leaves still outnumber those that have turned.  As the boughs sway in a breeze, one hears a susurration, a sea-sound, not a rattling.  On a clear day, leaf-shadows and patches of sunlight continue to revolve on the ground, kaleidoscopic, unceasing.

But yesterday afternoon I noticed dry yellow leaves gathering in the gutters as I walked through what was otherwise a green tunnel of trees.  A group of three maples I have come to know as the earliest heralds of autumn began their transformation at the beginning of the month: the highest boughs and the leaves out at the tips of the lower branches are scarlet; only a dwindling inner core of summer green remains.  "Now it is September and the web is woven./The web is woven and you have to wear it."  (Wallace Stevens, "The Dwarf.")

                         The Crossing

September, and the butterflies are drifting

Across the sky again, the monarchs in

Their myriads, delicate lenses for the light

To fall through and be mandarin-transformed.

I guess they are flying southward, or anyhow

That seems to be the average of their drift,

Though what you mostly see is a random light

Meandering, a Brownian movement to the wind,

Which is one of Nature's ways of getting it done,

Whatever it may be, the rise of hills

And settling of seas, the fall of leaf

Across the shoulder of the northern world,

The snowflakes one by one that silt the field . . .

All that's preparing now behind the scene,

As the ecliptic and equator cross,

Through which the light butterflies are flying.

Howard Nemerov, Gnomes & Occasions (University of Chicago Press 1973).

John Lawson (1868-1909), "An Ayrshire Stream" (1893)

I have a vague notion of what occurs when "the ecliptic and equator cross."  Something to do with the movement of spheres, I suspect. But I'm reminded of my oft-repeated first principle of poetry: Explanation and explication are the death of poetry.  Here is a wider principle I have adopted at this moment: Explanation and explication are the death of enchantment.  The enchantment of the World, of course.  Mind you, I accept the existence of the ecliptic and the equator.  This is not an anti-scientific manifesto.  I simply prefer, for instance, a single butterfly or a single leaf, with no explanations attached.

In a headnote to a haiku, Bashō (1644-1694) writes: "As we look calmly, we see everything is content with itself."  (Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 153.)  The haiku is: "Playing in the blossoms/a horsefly . . . don't eat it,/friendly sparrows!"  (Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), Ibid, page 153.)  Ueda provides this annotation: "The headnote is a sentence that often appears in Taoist classics, although Bashō probably took it from a poem by the Confucian philosopher Ch'eng Ming-tao."  (Ibid, p. 153.)

Bashō's headnote brings to mind a notebook entry written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "September 1 -- the beards of Thistle & dandelions flying above the lonely mountains like life, & I saw them thro' the Trees skimming the lake like Swallows --."  (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804 (Pantheon 1957), Notebook Entry 799 (September 1, 1800).  The text is as it appears in the notebook.)

All of which leads us to a single leaf:

                         Threshold

When in still air and still in summertime

A leaf has had enough of this, it seems

To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage

Its drifting in detachment down the road.

Howard Nemerov, Gnomes & Occasions.

A single leaf.  Or a single butterfly.  No explanations required, or necessary.

A butterfly flits

All alone -- and on the field,

A shadow in the sunlight.

Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Bashō (Twayne 1970), page 50.

Henry Justice Ford (1860-1941)

"A View of Church Hill from the Mill Pond, Old Swanage" (1931)

[A coda. "The boatman" calling in someone out on the water whose "time is up" in Derek Mahon's "September in Great Yarmouth" makes an appearance in another poem:

               Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens

     As they sit there, happily drinking,

their strokes, cancers, and so forth are not in their minds.

     Indeed, what earthly good would thinking

about the future (which is Death) do?  Each summer finds

     beer in their hands in big pint glasses.

     And so their leisure passes.

     Perhaps the older ones allow some inkling

into their thoughts.  Being hauled, as a kid, upstairs to bed

     screaming for a teddy or a tinkling

musical box, against their will.  Each Joe or Fred

     wants longer with the life and lasses.

     And so their time passes.

     Second childhood; and 'Come in, number 80!'

shouts inexorably the man in charge of the boating pool.

     When you're called you must go, matey,

so don't complain, keep it all calm and cool,

     there's masses of time yet, masses, masses . . .

     And so their life passes.

Gavin Ewart, in Philip Larkin (editor), Poetry Supplement Compiled by Philip Larkin for the Poetry Book Society (Poetry Book Society 1974).  Ewart and Larkin were friends.  The poem has a Larkinesque feel to it, doesn't it?  It's not surprising that Larkin chose to include it in the Poetry Book Society's annual Christmas anthology.

But I like to think that if Larkin had written the poem he would have softened it a bit, and made beautifully clear that we are all Yorkshiremen in pub gardens, each in our own way.  He likely would have done so in the final stanza: one long, lovely sentence hedged with one or two qualifications and perhaps containing a reversal -- but absolutely, humanly true.  He is not the misanthropic, dour caricature he is often incorrectly made out to be by the inattentive. For example: "Something is pushing them/To the side of their own lives."  (Philip Larkin, "Afternoons.")  Or: "As they wend away/A voice is heard singing/Of Kitty, or Katy,/As if the name meant once/All love, all beauty."  (Philip Larkin, "Dublinesque.")  And this: "we should be careful//Of each other, we should be kind/While there is still time."  (Philip Larkin, "The Mower.")

For some reason, I find myself reminded of a poem by Su Tung-p'o. It is a poem of spring, and thus may seem out of season.  But the final line is apt in any season, and at any time, in any place.

          Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade

Pear blossoms pale white, willows deep green --

when willow fluff scatters, falling blossoms will fill the town.

Snowy boughs by the eastern palisade set me pondering --

in a lifetime how many springs do we see?

Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o (Copper Canyon Press 1994), page 68.

In a lifetime, how many Septembers do we see?]

Alexander Jamieson (1873-1937)

"Halton Lake, Wendover, Buckinghamshire"

Beauty



" . . . like a dove/That slants unswerving to its home and love."

Earlier this week, about an hour before sunset, I was out for a walk, my attention drawn to the sky in the west.  The waters of Puget Sound were a dark slate-grey, with a slight undertone of purple. Beyond the Sound, on the horizon, the Olympic Mountains stood in a row.  The sky to the east was mostly clear.  But directly overhead was the leading edge of a layer of cloud which extended across the water, ending in a long straight line above the mountains.  

The descending sun was hidden.  Yet a glowing path of yellow sky ran from north to south between the silhouette of the mountain range and the far dark edge of the cloud layer.  That band of changing golden light -- soon to vanish -- demanded one's attention: what would come of it between now and sunset?

I kept walking, looking to the west.  The twilit road passed through a meadow, a scattering of trees on either side.  Suddenly, just ahead of me, an owl glided quickly and silently downward from left to right above the road, landing in a nearly leafless tree out in the meadow, beside a grove of pines.

Last week, I read this:

                               Beauty

What does it mean?  Tired, angry, and ill at ease,

No man, woman, or child alive could please

Me now.  And yet I almost dare to laugh

Because I sit and frame an epitaph --

'Here lies all that no one loved of him

And that loved no one.'  Then in a trice that whim

Has wearied.  But, though I am like a river

At fall of evening while it seems that never

Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while

Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,

This heart, some fraction of me, happily

Floats through the window even now to a tree

Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,

Not like a pewit that returns to wail

For something it has lost, but like a dove

That slants unswerving to its home and love.

There I find my rest, and through the dusk air

Flies what yet lives in me.  Beauty is there.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems (edited by Edna Longley) (Bloodaxe Books 2008), page 58. Thomas wrote the poem on January 21, 1915.  Ibid, page 186.

Ethelbert White (1891-1972), "Edge of the Village" (1924)

Edward Thomas' life story tends to draw attention away from his poetry.  This is not surprising.  Born to be a poet, he married at a young age, left Oxford without taking a degree, and became a prolific writer of prose in order to support his family.  He was beset with melancholy, misery, and dejection.  Then, in the autumn of 1913, came the fated and wondrous meeting with Robert Frost.  This friendship, coupled with the beginning of war in 1914 and his subsequent enlistment, led to a poetic flowering which lasted just over two years (the first of his poems was written on December 3, 1914; the final poem was written on January 13, 1917).  The tragic end -- which cannot help but be in the back of our minds as we read his poems -- came at Arras in France on April 9, 1917.

Yes, the short arc of his life is compelling and moving.  But it is the 140 or so poems he wrote during those two charmed years that deserve our attention.  "I may as well write poetry.  Did anyone ever begin at 36 in the shade?"  So he wrote in a letter to Eleanor Farjeon on August 2, 1914.  (Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (Oxford University Press 1958), page 81.)  We are fortunate that he began "at 36 in the shade."  For he is in his poetry, and we are the better for it.  "Beauty" is a perfect instance.  The first ten lines are a harrowing and accurate account of who he was.  And yet the final eight lines (which begin with the wonderful turn at "This heart . . .") are an affecting, lovely, and equally accurate account of who he was.  He never dissembles or postures in his poetry.

Kingsley Amis (who was not easy to please) recognized this quality: "How a poet convinces you he will not tell you anything he does not think or feel, since you have only his word for it, is hard to discover, but Edward Thomas is one of those who do it."  (Kingsley Amis, The Amis Anthology (Hutchinson 1988), page 339.)  Amis' comment is reminiscent of something which Thom Gunn wrote of Thomas Hardy: "And we never for a moment doubt that Hardy means what he says. . . . [Y]ou never feel, even in Hardy's most boring and ridiculous poetry, that he is pretending -- he is never rhetorical. And there are not many poets of whom this can be said. . . . Much of what sustains me through the flatter parts of the Collected Poems is this feeling of contact with an honest man who will never lie to me." (Thom Gunn, "Hardy and the Ballads," in Thom Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography (North Point Press 1985), pages 104-105.)  I believe that Gunn's comments apply equally well to Edward Thomas.  (It is not surprising to discover that Hardy admired Thomas' poetry, which he became aware of only after Thomas' death.)

As it happens, Amis' comment is in fact an echo of Thomas' own words about what it means to be a poet:

"Here, I think, in [John Clare's] 'Love lives beyond the tomb,' in this unprejudiced singing voice that knows not what it sings, is some reason for us to believe that poets are not merely writing figuratively when they say, 'My love is like a red, red rose,' that they are to be taken more literally than they commonly are, that they do not invent or 'make things up' as grown people do when they condescend to a child's game.  What they say is not chosen to represent what they feel or think, but is itself the very substance of what had before lain dark and unapparent, is itself all that survives of feeling and thought, and cannot be expanded or reduced without dulling or falsification.  If this is not so, and if we do not believe it to be so, then poetry is of no greater importance than wallpaper, or a wayside drink to one who is not thirsty.  But if it is so, then we are on the way to understand why poetry is mighty; for if what poets say is true and not feigning, then of how little account are our ordinary assumptions, our feigned interests, our playful and our serious pastimes spread out between birth and death."

Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (Martin Secker 1910), page 86.

Ethelbert White, "The Farm by the Brook" (1929)

"What are days for?/Days are where we live. . . . Where can we live but days?"  (Philip Larkin, "Days.")  "For the days are long --/From the first milk van/To the last shout in the night,/An eternity."  (Derek Mahon, "Dream Days.")  Here is a further thought for consideration: days are where beauty dwells.  "Beauty is there."

Eleanor Farjeon writes that Thomas' "secret self pined for beauty." (Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, page 41.) Yet, as Larkin perceptively observes: "What a strange talent his was: the poetry of almost infinitely-qualified states of mind."  (Philip Larkin, letter to Andrew Motion (May 16, 1979), in Anthony Thwaite (editor), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985 (Faber and Faber 1992), page 599.)  These two characteristics often appear together in Thomas' poems.  

But perhaps this gets to the heart of the matter for Thomas (and indeed for us as well):

"I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination -- What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -- whether it existed before or not -- for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love[:] they are all[,] in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty."

John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey (November 22, 1817), in Robert Gittings (editor), Letters of John Keats (Oxford University Press 1970), pages 36-37.  

As one might expect, Thomas was aware of the passage from Keats' letter.  He wrote a literary biography of Keats.  In a chapter titled "Keats and His Friends," Thomas mentions Benjamin Bailey, and then notes: "It was in a letter to Bailey that Keats said he was certain of nothing but 'the holiness of the Heart's affections, and the truth of imagination'."  (Edward Thomas, Keats (T. C. & E. C. Jack 1916), page 30.)

                               The Ash Grove

Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made

Little more than the dead ones made of shade.

If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall:

But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause and delayed.

Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval --

Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles -- but nothing at all,

Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,

Could climb down in to molest me over the wall

That I passed through at either end without noticing.

And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring

The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost

With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing

The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,

And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,

But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die

And I had what most I desired, without search or desert or cost.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, page 108.  The poem was written on February 4 through February 9, 1916.  Ibid, page 272.

Ethelbert White, "Landscape with Cows and a Punt"

We all pine for beauty, don't we?  But, as Thomas reminds us in so many of his poems, beauty is not beauty without qualifications, without the contingency of evanescence.  Perhaps evanescence is at the heart of beauty -- is its essence.  "A thing is beautiful to the extent that it does not let itself be caught."  (Philippe Jaccottet (translated by John Taylor), "Blazon in Green and White," in Philippe Jaccottet, And, Nonetheless: Selected Prose and Poetry 1990-2009 (Chelsea Editions 2011), page 53.)

                    Over the Hills

Often and often it came back again

To mind, the day I passed the horizon ridge

To a new country, the path I had to find

By half-gaps that were stiles once in the hedge,

The pack of scarlet clouds running across

The harvest evening that seemed endless then

And after, and the inn where all were kind,

All were strangers.  I did not know my loss

Till one day twelve months later suddenly

I leaned upon my spade and saw it all,

Though far beyond the sky-line.  It became

Almost a habit through the year for me

To lean and see it and think to do the same

Again for two days and a night.  Recall

Was vain: no more could the restless brook

Ever turn back and climb the waterfall

To the lake that rests and stirs not in its nook,

As in the hollow of the collar-bone

Under the mountain's head of rush and stone.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, page 52.  Thomas wrote the poem on January 9, 1915, the day after he wrote "Adelstrop," and twelve days before he wrote "Beauty."  Ibid, pages 176, 179, and 186.

Would that Edward Thomas had begun writing poetry earlier in his life.  Would that he had not died at so young an age.  How many more days in which he came upon beauty might he have given us in his poetry?  But we should be grateful for what he was able to give us from the days he spent in the countryside of England and Wales.   

Ethelbert White, "Landscape"  

Autumn

I beg your pardon, dear readers, for the lengthy silence.  I fell ill upon returning from an early September journey to Southern California to attend a nephew's wedding.  Of course, the usual suspect came to mind, but several tests over two weeks were negative.  Whatever it was, it was unpleasant.  Emerging from the fog, other commitments required my attention.  

I now return, having survived a paucity of beauty and truth over the past two months by reading haiku -- one in the morning and one in the evening -- from R. H. Blyth's four-volume Haiku, and by eventually returning to my walks.  I became accustomed to brevity followed by silence.  Not a bad thing.

One day earlier this month, I returned to a favorite passage:

"More than half a century of existence has taught me that most of the wrong and folly which darken earth is due to those who cannot possess their souls in quiet; that most of the good which saves mankind from destruction comes of life that is led in thoughtful stillness.  Every day the world grows noisier; I, for one, will have no part in that increasing clamour, and, were it only by my silence, I confer a boon on all."

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Archibald Constable & Co. 1903), pages 13-14.

Of course, this sort of thing (a variation on Pascal) is unrealistic and irresponsible, isn't it?  A pernicious daydream, deluded and selfish. And yet . . .

     The stillness;

A bird walking on the fallen leaves:

     The sound of it.

Ryūshi (d. 1681) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 365.

Alexander Sillars Burns (1911-1987), "Afternoon, Wester Ross"

Until a week or so ago, autumn here was unusually sunny and rain-free.  The leaves on many of the trees remain green, but they have dried out.  The leaf-shadows and sunlight still sway together on the ground, but with less definition, less depth.  On a breezy day, the sound overhead has changed: little by little, sibilance has turned to a faint rustling.

                 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).

For me, autumn is not autumn without a visit to Mahon's "Leaves."  I return for the poem as a whole, but -- ah! -- the last two lines of the second stanza: the very heart of autumn.  

     People are few;

A leaf falls here,

     Falls there.

Issa (1763-1828) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter, page 364.

Adam Bruce Thomson (1885-1976), "Harvesting in Galloway"

Every autumn, there is a particular view that I treasure.  My usual walking route takes me along the brow of a low hill, about a quarter-mile long.  The hill slopes down toward a meadow to the west.  As I approach the end of the brow to descend, the highest boughs of three maples that lie in the meadow below appear just beyond the edge of the brow.  Their leaves are a brilliant deep-red at this time of year.  As I get closer to the edge, the trees are revealed bit-by-bit, from tip to trunk.  And, finally, there they are: standing in a serene row as I walk downward toward them. 

          A Day in Autumn

It will not always be like this,

The air windless, a few last

Leaves adding their decoration

To the trees' shoulders, braiding the cuffs

Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening

In the lawn's mirror.  Having looked up

From the day's chores, pause a minute,

Let the mind take its photograph

Of the bright scene, something to wear

Against the heart in the long cold.

R. S. Thomas, Poetry for Supper (Rupert Hart-Davis 1958).

"Life that is led in thoughtful stillness."  This is neither indolence nor impassivity.

     The wind brings

Enough of fallen leaves

     To make a fire.

Ryōkan (1758-1831) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter, page 357.

Ian MacInnes (1922-2003), "Harvest, Innertoon" (1959)

As I have said here in the past: this is the season of bittersweet wistfulness and wistful bittersweetness.  "You sound like a broken record."  This is a phrase that was common in the days of my youth (the Sixties and the Seventies).  I'm afraid that it applies to me, a nattering Baby Boomer who looks back on a lost world.  Before long, I will be recounting fond memories of neighborhood families raking oak leaves into piles, and setting them ablaze as dusk fell on a Minnesota evening.  And, yes, I do remember quite well the smell of burning leaves.  

                    Under Trees

Yellow tunnels under the trees, long avenues

Long as the whole of time:

A single aimless man

Carries a black garden broom.

He is too far to hear him

Wading through the leaves, down autumn 

Tunnels, under yellow leaves, long avenues.

Geoffrey Grigson, The Collected Poems of Geoffrey Grigson, 1924-1962 (Phoenix House 1963).

Am I being sentimental about autumn?  One sometimes hears derisive comments about "sentimentality."  Oh well.

     The autumn of my life;

The moon is a flawless moon,

     Nevertheless --

Issa (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 396.

Adam Bruce Thomson, "Still Life at a Window" (1944)

Gulls

I am content to live my life in accordance with certain truisms.  For instance: Human nature has never changed, and never will.  And one of its corollaries: Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.  Both of these seem quite apt in light of the events of the past week.  

I suspect that the utility of truisms becomes more apparent as one ages.  This is not necessarily a matter of attaining wisdom (I can attest to that).  Rather, it reflects a paring away of that which is inessential, beside the point.  There is little time left.  Why expend any of it on the sophistries of the world?

                      The Truisms

His father gave him a box of truisms

Shaped like a coffin, then his father died;

The truisms remained on the mantelpiece

As wooden as the playbox they had been packed in

Or that other his father skulked inside.

Then he left home, left the truisms behind him

Still on the mantelpiece, met love, met war,

Sordor, disappointment, defeat, betrayal,

Till through disbeliefs he arrived at a house

He could not remember seeing before.

And he walked straight in; it was where he had come from

And something told him the way to behave.

He raised his hand and blessed his home;

The truisms flew and perched on his shoulders

And a tall tree sprouted from his father's grave.

Louis MacNeice, Solstices (Faber and Faber 1961).

Charles Ginner (1878-1952), "Hartland Point from Boscastle" (1941)

The truisms mostly provide a framework for the world of humans, happenstance, and history, the world of fortune and of fate.  As for the World -- the World of beautiful particulars -- that is something else entirely.  I expect no explanations, answers, or solutions to arrive.  That being said, I am always on the lookout for glimmers and glimpses, calls and whispers, from near or far.  Yesterday, I came across thousands of tangled bare branches, a few passing white clouds, and a blue sky -- all floating on the surface of a puddle along the edge of a pathway.  Birdsong was with me wherever I walked.

Still, there are truisms that apply both to the world and the World.  For example: One thing leads to another.  As I have noted here in the past, one of the charms of poetry is that you never know where a poem will take you.  A few mornings ago, I read this:

        Evening Rain by the Bridge

Showering, the rain by the bridge,

Under shadow, at nightfall is not yet hushed.

A fisherman in straw coat waits hesitant on the bluff;

The monks' gong sounds across the central stream.

Sad and still, bush clover at twilight --

Blue into the distance, water oats in autumn.

How beautiful is the clear shallow water!

Tranquil: a single sand gull.

Ichū Tsūjo (1349-1429) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury, Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992).

The poem is a kanshi: a poem written in Chinese characters by a Japanese poet.  The writing of kanshi developed due to the popularity of classical Chinese poetry in Japan.  A kanshi replicates the formal structures and prosodic features of Chinese poetry (the number of lines in a particular lyric form, the prescribed number of characters in each line, as well as requirements relating to rhyme, tonal patterns, and verbal parallelisms).  

Although very few of the Japanese poets who wrote kanshi were fluent in, or spoke, Chinese, they were familiar with Chinese characters (known as kanji in Japanese) given that the characters are used in the Japanese writing system.  For many years (particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries), the writing of kanshi was popular among Zen Buddhist monks due to Zen's origin in Chinese Ch'an Buddhism.  A number of these monks had traveled to China to study Ch'an, and, while living there, had also grown fond of Chinese poetry.

Charles Ginner, "Dahlias and Cornflowers" (1929)

Ichū Tsūjo's "Tranquil: a single sand gull" soon brought to mind one of Tu Fu's best-known, most-beloved poems:

   A Traveler at Night Writes His Thoughts

Delicate grasses, faint wind on the bank;

stark mast, a lone night boat:

stars hang down, over broad fields sweeping;

the moon boils up, on the great river flowing.

Fame -- how can my writings win me that?

Office -- age and sickness have brought it to an end.

Fluttering, fluttering -- where is my likeness?

Sky and earth and one sandy gull.

Tu Fu (712-770) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984).

Very little has been written about Ichū Tsūjo in English, so I am not qualified to opine upon his familiarity either with Chinese poetry in general or with Tu Fu's poetry in particular.  However, I suspect that he was familiar with both Tu Fu's poetry and with "A Traveler at Night Writes His Thoughts."  I would also not be surprised if "Tranquil: a single sand gull" is a conscious echo of "Fluttering, fluttering -- where is my likeness?/Sky and earth and one sandy gull."

Charles Ginner, "Novar Cottage, Bearley, Warwickshire" (1933)

Tu Fu's "one sandy gull" in turn brought me to this, one of my favorite poems of spring:

   The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush

Before the first visitor comes the spring

Softening the sharp air of the coast

In time for the first seasonal 'invasion.'

Today the place is as it might have been,

Gentle and almost hospitable.  A girl

Strides past the Northern Counties Hotel,

Light-footed, swinging a book-bag,

And the doors that were shut all winter

Against the north wind and the sea-mist

Lie open to the street, where one

By one the gulls go window-shopping

And an old wolfhound dozes in the sun.

While I sit with my paper and prawn chow mein

Under a framed photograph of Hong Kong

The proprietor of the Chinese restaurant

Stands at the door as if the world were young,

Watching the first yacht hoist a sail

-- An ideogram on sea-cloud -- and the light

Of heaven upon the hills of Donegal;

And whistles a little tune, dreaming of home.

Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (The Gallery Press 1999).

Gulls.  One thing leads to another: from the banks of a village stream in 14th century Japan, to a boat anchored in a great river in 8th century China, and, finally, to a seaside town in 20th century Northern Ireland.  Are such journeys idle indulgences in a world of misery, calamity, and evil?  Or are such journeys absolute necessities in a world of misery, calamity, and evil?

Charles Ginner, "Yellow Chrysanthemums" (1929)

Leaves

Ah, ever redolent autumn, realm of memory and of reflection!  Who knows what the leaves -- fallen, falling, or holding fast -- will awaken or evoke?

A few days ago I walked past a big-leaf maple.  About thirty feet tall, it had only a few hundred yellow and brown leaves remaining on its branches.  I stopped to look up at the leaves, which were set against a blue sky scattered with white and grey clouds, remnants of a storm that had recently passed through.  The blue above was bright, illuminated by the rays of the late afternoon sun, which was hidden by the clouds.  The yellow emanations from an unseen source seemed to give the blue a greater depth, a greater distance. Unreachably beautiful.

As I looked, suddenly, but only for an instant, I was a child on a cold autumn afternoon in Minnesota, gazing up at the leaves of a tree against a blue and grey sky.  1962?  1963?  I couldn't say.  But I was not "remembering" that childhood day in Minnesota: in that instant, I was there.  It was a matter of feeling, not of recollection.  I was in two times and in two places at once.  For better or worse, nothing had changed.  There I was and here I am.  One and the same.  And then the instant was gone.

                  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).

William Samuel Jay (1843-1933)

"At the Fall of Leaf, Arundel Park, Sussex" (1883)

My beloved tree tunnels are not what they were three months ago. But they remain lovely.  The leaves that are left still rustle in the wind, but in a different key.  One walks toward, and into, an open, mottled world of gold and red and brown, a patchwork of colors overhead and at one's feet, not into a closed, deep-green world.  The light and air within take on the color of the leaves.  "The world is a continual change," Marcus Aurelius tells us.  (Meditations, Book IV, Section 3; translated by Francis Hutcheson and James Moor, 1742.) "Earth never grieves!"  So Thomas Hardy reminds us.  ("Autumn in King's Hintock Park.")  And, finally, Ryōkan quietly says: "The wind has brought/enough fallen leaves/to make a fire."  (Translated by John Stevens, 1977.)  Nothing is awry.

                       Under Trees

Yellow tunnels under the trees, long avenues

Long as the whole of time:

A single aimless man

Carries a black garden broom.

He is too far to hear him

Wading through the leaves, down autumn

Tunnels, under yellow leaves, long avenues.

Geoffrey Grigson, The Collected Poems of Geoffrey Grigson 1924-1962 (Phoenix House 1963).

John Milne Donald (1819-1866), "Autumn Leaves" (1864) 

Leaves

With so many to choose from, I would never attempt to select my "favorite" autumn poem.  They are better thought of as parts of a tapestry.  Or a brocade.

     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"