When I was 19, I was attending a university that is located beside the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara. I presume that I had nothing to complain about. For instance, I remember playing basketball outside in the sun on the asphalt while listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd play a concert in an outdoor stadium that lay across the playing fields from the courts. I recall "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Free Bird" wafting over the green fields on the breeze.
As they say (and I realized this -- with a pang -- on that afternoon): "It doesn't get any better than this." I suppose that those are the youthful Wordsworthian intimations of immortality/mortality that one was liable to have at that time and in that place.
October
O leafy yellowness you create for me
A world that was and now is poised above time,
I do not need to puzzle out Eternity
As I walk this arboreal street on the edge of a town.
The breeze, too, even the temperature
And pattern of movement, is precisely the same
As broke my heart for youth passing. Now I am sure
Of something. Something will be mine wherever I am.
I want to throw myself on the public street without caring
For anything but the prayering that the earth offers.
It is October over all my life and the light is staring
As it caught me once in a plantation by the fox coverts.
A man is ploughing ground for winter wheat
And my nineteen years weigh heavily on my feet.
Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960).
Kavanagh wrote "October" during the period of exhilaration and creativity that followed his successful treatment for lung cancer in 1955. I have previously discussed this time of his life in connection with his poems "Is" and "Question to Life." Like many of the poems that Kavanagh wrote during this period, "October" is a sonnet (or something akin to a sonnet).
