"Who Has Seen The Wind?"

In terms of reading poetry, I've barely scratched the surface.  I'd guess I've read about 1% of the poetry that I would have liked to have read by this point in my life.  But I'm not concerned.  I'm not preparing for an examination.  I'm not in a contest.  In fact, I'm reluctant to read more than one or two poems a day.  A poem deserves attention.  It also needs to sit a while.  It is not a text message.  It is not a sound bite.

Many of us have experienced sensory overload when visiting an art museum:  in time, you lose your ability to see.  I've concluded that I'm better off spending a great deal of time in front of a few paintings rather than trying to look at them all.  The same principle applies, I think, to the reading of poetry:  less is better.  But perhaps I'm simply trying to rationalize my slow pace (and my slow-wittedness).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Braes o' Lundie"

One advantage of my snail's pace is that it allows me to mull things over. Other possibilities may present themselves if you let a poem percolate. Some of these possibilities may lie outside of the poem. For instance, I recently read the following poem for the first time.

             Till I Went Out

Till I went out of doors to prove
What through my window I saw move;
To see if grass was brighter yet,
And if the stones were dark and wet;

Till I went out to see a sign --
That slanted rain, so light and fine,
Had almost settled in my mind
That I at last could see the wind.

W. H. Davies, Forty New Poems (1918).

I am not going to suggest that this is the sort of revelatory poem by which one can steer the course of one's life.  But it shouldn't be passed over quickly.  Consider, for example, the final line, with its implication that this is not the first occasion on which the speaker has sought to see the wind. Some may consider this madness.  Not I.

After reading the poem, I felt that this notion of seeing the wind was something that I had encountered before.  But I couldn't put my finger on it. Then, the next morning, I remembered this.

Who has seen the wind?
     Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling
     The wind is passing thro'.

Who has seen the wind?
     Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
     The wind is passing by.

Christina Rossetti, Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872).

Again, this is not a life-changing poem.  But the movement from "Till I Went Out" is a pleasant one.

James McIntosh Patrick

"Rum and Eigg from Ardtoe, Acharacle, Argyllshire" (1959)

Next, Rossetti's poem prompted me to recall this untitled poem by Michael Longley.

When all the reeds are swaying in the wind
How can you tell which reeds the otters bend?

Michael Longley, Selected Poems (Jonathan Cape 1998).

I find this emergence of connections to be rewarding.  These things happen in their own easy-going fashion.  It is not a matter of study or of explication.  Each poem we read stands on its own.  Yet each poem also has a place in the ever-changing kaleidoscope of every poem we have ever read.  And there is no hurry.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Autumn, Kinnordy" (1936)

Remembrance Day: "The Silver Thrush No More Crying Canada -- Canada For The Memory"

For all of the heartbreaking personal anguish evident in Ivor Gurney's war poetry, what moves me most deeply in the poetry is his compassion for, and his ever-enduring memory of, those who were with him.  On this Remembrance Day, the following poems by Gurney seem appropriate.

Cecil Constant Philip Lawson, "Moving Up" (c. 1916-1918)

                           
                              Canadians

We marched, and saw a company of Canadians
Their coats weighed eighty pounds at least, we saw them
Faces infinitely grimed in, with almost dead hands
Bent, slouching downwards to billets comfortless and dim.
Cave dwellers last of tribes they seemed, and a pity
Even from us just relieved (much as they were), left us.
Somme, what a desolation's damned land, what iniquity
Of mere being.  There of what youth that country bereft us;
Plagues of evil lay in Death's Valley we also had
Forded that up to the thighs in chill mud almost still-stood
As they had gone -- and endured day as night without sun.
Gone for five days then any sign of life glow
As the notched stumps or the gray clouds (then) we stood;
Dead past death from first hour and the needed mood
Of level pain shifting continually to and fro.
Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, Stewart White ran in
My own mind; what in others?  These men who finely
Perhaps had chosen danger for reckless and fine chance
Fate had sent for suffering and dwelling obscenely
Vermin eaten, fed beastly, in vile ditches meanly.
(Backwoods or clean Quebec for defiled, ruined, man-killing France
And the silver thrush no more crying Canada -- Canada for the memory.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996).

"Death's Valley" (line 9) (also referred to as "Death Valley") was the name given to a terrain feature on the Somme battlefield.  The punctuation (or lack thereof), including the lack of a closing parenthesis at the end of the last line, reflect Gurney's typescript. The poem was not published during his lifetime.

Cecil Constant Philip Lawson, "Arras" (c. 1917-1918)

                           First Time In

After the dread tales and red yarns of the Line
Anything might have come to us; but the divine
Afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony
Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory
Soft foreign things.  Then we were taken in
To low huts candle-lit shaded close by slitten
Oilsheets, and there but boys gave us kind welcome;
So that we looked out as from the edge of home.
Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions
To human hopeful things.  And the next days' guns
Nor any line-pangs ever quite could blot out
That strangely beautiful entry to War's rout,
Candles they gave us precious and shared over-rations --
Ulysses found little more in his wanderings without doubt.
'David of the white rock', the 'Slumber Song' so soft, and that
Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys
Are sung -- but never more beautiful than here under the guns' noise.

Ivor Gurney, Ibid.

The tenderness is touching, especially as contrasted with the harrowing circumstances.  "A Welsh colony/Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory/Soft foreign things" is very lovely and affecting.  "David of the White Rock" ("Dafydd y Garreg Wen") and "Slumber Song" ("Suo Gan") are traditional Welsh songs.  Gurney the musician and composer would likely have been beguiled by the singing.

Cecil Constant Philip Lawson, "Somme" (c. 1916-1918)

Finally, there is this sonnet, which is one of Gurney's best-known poems.

                              Strange Hells

There are strange Hells within the minds War made
Not so often, not so humiliatingly afraid
As one would have expected -- the racket and fear guns made.
One Hell the Gloucester soldiers they quite put out;
Their first bombardment, when in combined black shout
Of fury, guns aligned, they ducked lower their heads --
And sang with diaphragms fixed beyond all dreads,
That tin and stretched-wire tinkle, that blither of tune;
'Apres la guerre fini' till Hell all had come down.
12 inch -- 6 inch and 18 pounders hammering Hell's thunders.

Where are They now on State-doles, or showing shop-patterns
Or walking town to town sore in borrowed tatterns
Or begged.  Some civic routine one never learns.
The heart burns -- but has to keep out of face how heart burns.

Ivor Gurney, Ibid.

The final two lines are, of course, remarkable -- and devastating.  First comes: "Some civic routine one never learns."  On a first reading, this could possibly have a hint of wryness about it.  Possibly.  But then comes this: "The heart burns -- but has to keep out of face how heart burns."  One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved.  There are things that we will never come close to fathoming because we were not there, but which can still bring a tear to the eye.

Cecil Constant Philip Lawson, "Sanctuary Wood" (c. 1916-1917)

"Every Day The World Grows Noisier; I, For One, Will Have No Part In That Increasing Clamour"

I have written before in praise of idleness.  One of my favorite apostrophes to idleness appears in George Gissing's The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft:

"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 (1903), pages 13-14.

This is an elaboration of Pascal's famous dictum:  "I have often said, that all the Misfortune of Men proceeds from their not knowing how to keep themselves quiet in their Chamber."  Blaise Pascal, Pensees (translated by Joseph Walker) (1688).

Alas, those who wish to change the world -- politicians, social engineers, media mouthpieces, and their ilk -- are unlikely to read, much less take heed of, Pascal and Gissing.  Thus, the rest of us must do our best to mitigate the Sisyphean antics and the noisy noisomeness of these busybodies by keeping our wits about us and by remaining idle and quiet.

Percy Horton, "The Road to the Fells, Ambleside" (c. 1943)

Mind you, we shouldn't confuse idleness with inactivity or lassitude, as Andrew Young points out.  One must be vigilant and attentive in order to be idle.

                 Idleness

God, you've so much to do,
To think of, watch and listen to,
That I will let all else go by
And lending ear and eye
Help you to watch how in the combe
Winds sweep dead leaves without a broom;
And rooks in the spring-reddened trees
Restore their villages,
Nest by dark nest
Swaying at rest on the trees' frail unrest;
Or on this limestone wall,
Leaning at ease, with you recall
How once these heavy stones
Swam in the sea as shells and bones;
And hear that owl snore in a tree
Till it grows dark enough for him to see;
In fact, will learn to shirk
No idleness that I may share your work.

Andrew Young, Collected Poems (Rupert Hart-Davis 1960).

A side-note: "Nest by dark nest/Swaying at rest on the trees' frail unrest" is particularly nice, I think.

Percy Horton, "Storm over Loughrigg" (c. 1943)

Indeed, idleness is an essential element of a well-lived life, as pointed out by Kathleen Raine in the following untitled poem.

Your gift of life was idleness,
As you would set day's task aside
To marvel at an opening bud,
Quivering leaf, or spider's veil
On dewy grass in morning spread.
These were your wandering thoughts, that strayed
Across the ever-changing mind
Of airy sky and travelling cloud,
The harebell and the heather hill,
World without end, where you could lose
Memory, identity and name
And all that you beheld, became,
Insect wing and net of stars
Or silver-glistering wind-borne seed
For ever drifting free from time.
What has unbounded life to do
With body's grave and body's womb,
Span of life and little room?

Kathleen Raine, The Oval Portrait (1977).

Percy Horton, "A Corner of Ambleside" (c. 1943)

"I Tread On Many Autumns Here"

Over the weekend we had a strong wind-storm, and the trees have now lost most of their leaves.  I'm not inclined to hear voices when I am out and about in the World.  Today, however, as I walked beneath bare branches, through piles of fallen leaves, I heard the trees say something along these lines:  That's it.  We're done.  Ah, look at the waste around us!  It's sad, isn't it?

Have no fear.  I'm not going mad.  I did not reply.

William Rothenstein (1872-1945), "St Martin's Summer"

The images of leaves underfoot in C. H. Sisson's "Leaves," which appeared here recently, reminded me of the following poem by Andrew Young.

      Walking in Beech Leaves

I tread on many autumns here
     But with no pride,
For at the leaf-fall of each year
     I also died.

This is last autumn, crisp and brown,
     That my knees feel;
But through how many years sinks down
     My sullen heel.

Andrew Young, Collected Poems (Rupert Hart-Davis 1960).

The poems by Sisson and Young in turn bring to mind the second stanza of Robert Frost's "In Hardwood Groves," which I have posted here before:

Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed.

Gilbert Spencer, "Burdens Farm with Melbury Beacon" (1943)

Well, one way or another, leaves -- and we -- reach the same destination. The World provides us with any number of symbols and metaphors and allegories for our journey towards this destination.  If forced to choose among the options, I would opt for leafhood.

        June Leaves and Autumn

                             I
Lush summer lit the trees to green;
     But in the ditch hard by
Lay dying boughs some hand unseen
Had lopped when first with festal mien
     They matched their mates on high.
It seemed a melancholy fate
That leaves but brought to birth so late
     Should rust there, red and numb,
In quickened fall, while all their race
Still joyed aloft in pride of place
     With store of days to come.

                             II
At autumn-end I fared that way,
     And traced those boughs fore-hewn
Whose leaves, awaiting their decay
In slowly browning shades, still lay
     Where they had lain in June
And now, no less embrowned and curst
Than if they had fallen with the first,
     Nor known a morning more,
Lay there alongside, dun and sere,
Those that at my last wandering here
     Had length of days in store.

Thomas Hardy, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928).

James Bateman, "Lulington Church" (1939)

A Lost World, Part Three: "Grave Sweet Ancestral Faces"

The following poem by Kathleen Raine has its source in a painting by Samuel Palmer.  I'm guessing that the painting she has in mind is the one that appears immediately below.  However, any number of paintings and engravings by Palmer (a few of which have appeared here previously) evoke a similar atmosphere.  My sense of Palmer is that he knew he was witnessing the passing of a world, and that he wished to preserve what he could of it before it vanished.

Samuel Palmer

"Coming from Evening Church" (1830)

          Returning from Church

That country spire -- Samuel Palmer knew
What world they entered, who,
Kneeling in English village pew,
Were near those angels whose golden effigies looked down
From Gothic vault or hammer-beam.
Grave sweet ancestral faces
Beheld, Sunday by Sunday, a holy place
Few find, who, pausing now
In empty churches, cannot guess
At those deep simple states of grace.

Kathleen Raine, The Oracle in the Heart (1980).

The poem brings to mind Philip Larkin's "Church Going" and J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country, both of which have a similar elegiac feeling.

Robin Tanner, "Harvest Festival" (1930)

The following poem by Derek Mahon goes well, I think, with Raine's poem.

                 Nostalgias

The chair squeaks in a high wind,
Rain falls from its branches;
The kettle yearns for the mountain,
The soap for the sea.
In a tiny stone church
On a desolate headland
A lost tribe is singing 'Abide With Me'.

Derek Mahon, Selected Poems  (Viking/The Gallery Press 1991).

Nowadays, the word "nostalgia" has acquired a vaguely pejorative sense. As has the word "sentimental," with which it is often paired.  At least that's my perception.  But perhaps I'm being defensive, since I do not find anything inherently wrong with nostalgia or sentimentality, as long as we realize that the past was not "better" in all respects than the world in which we presently live.  I'm pleased that we now have electricity and plumbing. Beyond that . . .

Of course, there are those who choose to believe that we have "advanced" beyond those lost times and that human history is an unbroken narrative of "progress," as measured in scientific and political terms.  How quaint and beguiling a notion.

"Men have judged that a king can make rain; we say this contradicts all experience.  Today they judge that aeroplanes and the radio etc. are means for the closer contact of peoples and the spread of culture."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Paragraph 132 (translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe) (Basil Blackwell 1969).

Samuel Palmer, "A Hilly Scene" (c. 1826)

            New World

New world, I see you dazzle,
Like the sun on a door-knocker
In a straight street inhabited
By people I do not know.

C. H. Sisson, Exactions (Carcanet 1980).

Robin Tanner, "Christmas" (1929)

"Earth Never Grieves"

Today was -- I'm afraid there is no other way to put it -- A Glorious Autumn Day.  Not a cloud in the sky.  The barest wisp of a wind.  The trees are half-empty, save for the Japanese maples, which are at their bright red brilliant peak.  On my afternoon walk, the only sounds were the cluck and chirp of birds in the distance and the rustle and crackle of leaves underfoot.

All seemed still and unchangeable.  I was doing my best to keep my mind empty, in deference to the World.  But some lines by Wallace Stevens appeared:  "He wanted to feel the same way over and over. . . . He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest/In a permanent realization." But, of course, that is not in the cards.  There shall be no walking beside the river, "under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast."  For which we should be thankful.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Feathers and Hyacinth Heads" (1962)

Upon returning, the following poem by Thomas Hardy came to mind.  It has appeared here before, but, as I am wont to say of poems that I like:  it bears revisiting.

  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 (1909).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Dead Leaves" (1963)

On a first reading, the following poem by C. H. Sisson is not as easily accessible as Hardy's poem.  However, it is worth the effort to puzzle it out.

                                Leaves

Leaves are plentiful on the ground, under the feet,
There cannot be too many, they lie below;
They rot, they blow about before they are rotted.
Were they ever affixed to trees?  I do not know.

The great connection is from the leaf to the root,
From branch, from tendril, to the low place
Below the burial ground, below the hope of the foot,
The hand stretched out, or the hidden face.

On all occasions, or most, remember this:
Then turn on yourself like a small whirlwind of leaves.

C. H. Sisson, Exactions (Carcanet 1980).

The two poems say roughly the same thing, don't they?  The final two lines are particularly lovely.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Dead Leaves and Birds' Eggs" (1963)

                         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, Collected Poems: 1924-1962 (1963).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Leaves" (1941-1942)

Divisions And Distances

Estrangement from a loved one (or from a once-loved one) is the theme of a large number of Thomas Hardy's poems.  Hardy's most significant estrangement was from Emma, his first wife.  Upon her death, the estrangement was converted into the sorrow and regret of Hardy's "Poems of 1912-13," his finest sustained poetic achievement.  But there are all sorts of separations and distances in his poetry.

"Neutral Tones," which appeared in my previous post, is an instance of the romantic estrangement of a young man.  Despite the direness of the scene (e.g., "a few leaves lay on the starving sod;/-- They had fallen from an ash, and were gray") one gets the sense that there is a bit of youthful self-dramatization at work.  In contrast, Hardy's later poems of estrangement tend to be less romanticized.

                  The Division

Rain on the windows, creaking doors,
        With blasts that besom the green,
And I am here, and you are there,
        And a hundred miles between!

O were it but the weather, Dear,
        O were it but the miles
That summed up all our severance,
        There might be room for smiles.

But that thwart thing betwixt us twain,
        Which nothing cleaves or clears,
Is more than distance, Dear, or rain,
        And longer than the years!

Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909).

Line 9 is remarkable: its eight clotted syllables embody "the division" and the distance between the couple.  "But that thwart thing betwixt us twain." (Try repeating that quickly five times.)  "Thwart" in the sense of "adverse, unfavourable, untoward, unpropitious; especially applied (with mixture of literal sense) to a wind or current:  cross."  OED.  Note the contrast between the first four syllables ("but that thwart thing") and the last four syllables ("betwixt us twain").  In working our way through the line, we enact the difficulty at hand.

Felicity Charlton (1913-2009), "Night and Day"

The theme of distance -- both physical and emotional -- in "The Division" is reminiscent of the following untitled poem by Mary Coleridge.

We never said farewell, nor even looked
     Our last upon each other, for no sign
Was made when we the linked chain unhooked
     And broke the level line.

And here we dwell together, side by side,
     Our places fixed for life upon the chart.
Two islands that the roaring seas divide
     Are not more far apart.

Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).

The image of the final two lines is lovely -- searing, but lovely.

Felicity Charlton, "Porthkerry, View of the City" (c. 1990)

In contrast (and to show that Hardy did not have an unremittingly dour view of the possibility of love and companionship), the following poem is worth considering.  Now, I wouldn't exactly call it a cheery poem, but I would say that it holds out hope.  A Hardyesque hope, granted.  But hope.

   The Farm-Woman's Winter

                          I
If seasons all were summers,
     And leaves would never fall,
And hopping casement-comers
     Were foodless not at all,
And fragile folk might be here
     That white winds bid depart;
Then one I used to see here
     Would warm my wasted heart!

                          II
One frail, who, bravely tilling
     Long hours in gripping gusts,
Was mastered by their chilling,
     And now his ploughshare rusts.
So savage winter catches
     The breath of limber things,
And what I love he snatches,
     And what I love not, brings.

Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909).

"White winds" (line 6) is very nice.

Felicity Charlton, "Lost People" (1992)

"I Am Your Old Intentions She Said And All Your Old Intentions Are Over"

W. B. Yeats's "Ephemera," which I posted last week, goes quite well with the following poem by Thomas Hardy.  Although the poem was first published in 1899 (in Hardy's first collection of verse), it was written much earlier in Hardy's life.  He appended "1867" to it when it was published. Thus, the poem either was based upon an incident that occurred in 1867 or was written in that year, likely the latter.  Richard Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), page 98; Dennis Taylor, "The Chronology of Hardy's Poetry," Victorian Poetry, Volume 37, Number 1 (Spring 1999), pages 1-58.

In 1867, Hardy was 27 years old.  Yeats was 19 when he wrote "Ephemera." It is not surprising that the two young romantics might alight upon a similar theme and similar images.  But in their own idiosyncratic fashions, of course.

John Nash, "Autumn, Berkshire" (1951)

                    Neutral Tones

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
          -- They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
          On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
          Like an ominous bird a-wing. . . .

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
          And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

Thomas Hardy, Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1899).

"Neutral Tones," like "Ephemera," is a poem that I discovered in my twenties.  I recall being particularly taken with:  "The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing/Alive enough to have strength to die."  The entire poem is evocative of that time of life, isn't it?

John Nash

"The Moat, Grange Farm, Kimble" (1922)

The following poem provides a nice complement to both "Neutral Tones" and "Ephemera."  Serendipitously, next Monday will be "Monday the 28th of October."

               Eastville Park

I sat on a bench in Eastville Park
It was Monday the 28th of October
I am your old intentions she said
And all your old intentions are over.

She stood beside me, I did not see her
Her shadow fell on Eastville Park
Not precise or shapely but spreading outwards
On the tatty grass of Eastville Park.

A swan might buckle its yellow beak
With the black of its eye and the black of its mouth
In a shepherd's crook, or the elms impend
Nothing of this could be said aloud.

I did not then sit on a bench
I was a shadow under a tree
I was a leaf the wind carried
Around the edge of the football game.

No need for any return for I find
Myself where I left myself -- in the lurch
There are no trams but I remember them
Wherever I went I came here first.

C. H. Sisson, Anchises (Carcanet 1976).  Eastville Park is in Bristol, where Sisson was born and raised.

Sisson's use of "impend" in "the elms impend" (line 11) is lovely:  he combines the word's usual emotional sense (e.g., "impending doom") with its less commonly used physical sense: "to hang over" or "to overhang."

John Nash, "The Garden" (1951)

Fountain

A small tree stands by itself out in one of the fields that I pass through on my afternoon walk.  Each autumn I watch the tree's leaves turn red and then fall over the course of a few weeks.  In time, the lone empty tree is surrounded by a round pall of red.

I am reminded of a prose passage by R. S. Thomas:

"There was a large ash tree at the entrance to the rectory lane that would be completely yellow by November.  One autumn the leaves remained on it longer than usual.  But there came a great frost one night, and the following day, as the sun rose, the leaves began to fall.  They continued to fall for hours until the tree was like a golden fountain playing silently in the sun; I shall never forget it."

R. S. Thomas, "Former Paths" (1972), in R. S. Thomas, Autobiographies (translated from Welsh by Jason Walford Davies) (J. M. Dent 1997), page 15.

Thomas revisited the incident in a later essay:

"At the end of the lane from the rectory to the main road, there was a very large ash tree.  The leaves remained on it very late one autumn, and all yellow.  But one night in November it froze hard until, when morning came, everywhere was white.  There was no wind, but as the sun rose above the hill, the leaves began to thaw in its modest warmth and then fall.  For two hours or more it was as if a golden fountain were playing there, as the leaves fell to form a thick carpet covering the road."

R. S. Thomas, "No-one" (1985), Ibid, page 101.

George Vicat Cole, "Harvesting in the Thames Valley" (1888)

In a previous post regarding Thomas's poem "A Thicket in Lleyn," I noted that the poem was based upon an experience that Thomas also described in prose.  The same thing occurs with respect to the ash tree that became a fountain of leaves.

          The Bush

I know that bush,
Moses; there are many of them
in Wales in the autumn, braziers
where the imagination
warms itself.  I have put off
pride and, knowing the ground
holy, lingered to wonder
how it is that I do not burn
and yet am consumed.

And in this country
of failure, the rain
falling out of a black
cloud in gold pieces there
are none to gather,
I have thought often
of the fountain of my people
that played beautifully here
once in the sun's light
like a tree undressing.

R. S. Thomas, Later Poems (Macmillan 1983).

The beginning of "The Bush" immediately brings to mind lines from Thomas's "The Bright Field":  ". . . It is the turning/aside like Moses to the miracle/of the lit bush, to a brightness/that seemed as transitory as your youth/once, but is the eternity that awaits you."  Likewise, the final lines of the poem are reminiscent of the final lines of "A Thicket in Lleyn":

Navigate by such stars as are not
leaves falling from life's
deciduous tree, but spray from the fountain
of the imagination, endlessly
replenishing itself out of its own waters.

George Vicat Cole, "Harvest Time" (1860)

Charles Tomlinson has written about a similar experience.

   One Day of Autumn

One day of autumn
sun had uncongealed
the frost that clung
wherever shadows spread
their arctic greys among
October grass:  mid-
field an oak still
held its foliage intact
but then began
releasing leaf by leaf
full half,
till like a startled
flock they scattered
on the wind:  and one
more venturesome than all
the others shone far out
a moment in mid-air,
before it glittered off
and sheered into the dip
a stream ran through
to disappear with it

Charles Tomlinson, The Shaft (Oxford University Press 1978).

George Vicat Cole, "Autumn Morning" (1891)

"The Falling Of The Leaves"

The two autumn poems by Arthur Symons in my previous post got me to thinking of autumn poems by another turn-of-the-century poet:  W. B. Yeats.  As I age, I find myself drawn more and more to the Yeats of the Celtic Twilight period.  Although Yeats's egotism and haughtiness have always been a stumbling block for me, I have never lost my fondness for the romantic, dreamy, love-struck poems of his early years (say up until about 1903, when In the Seven Woods was published).

Many of us went through a period of youthful infatuation with the poems of the younger Yeats.  And though the years have taught us a few things (as they taught Yeats), the poems are redolent of the time when I first read them.  They can still make the heart skip a beat -- for the poem itself and for what it brings back.

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

            The Falling of the Leaves

Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.

The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.

W. B. Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889).

Alexander Docharty, "An Autumn Day" (c. 1917)

                            Ephemera

'Your eyes that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
Because our love is waning.'
                                                      And then she:
'Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!'

Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
While slowly he whose hand held hers replied:
'Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.'

The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
A rabbit old and lame limped down the path;
Autumn was over him:  and now they stood
On the lone border of the lake once more:
Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves
Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
In bosom and hair.
                                      'Ah, do not mourn,' he said,
'That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.'

W. B. Yeats, Ibid.

Well, well.  Whew.  Sigh.  There was a time when I had the whole thing by heart.  It's a laundry list of youthful romantic melancholy, isn't it?  "How far away the stars seem, and how far/Is our first kiss . . . Passion has often worn our wandering hearts . . . our souls/Are love, and a continual farewell."  My favorite is:  " . . . the yellow leaves/Fell like faint meteors in the gloom."

Thomas Hardy certainly got it right in the closing stanza of "I Look Into My Glass":

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

Or, as a troubadour was newly singing in those long ago days when I was immersed in Yeats: "Either I'm too sensitive or else I'm getting soft." Another heartbreaking ode on the same theme:

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past.
I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast.

John Milne Donald, "Autumn Leaves" (1864)