Autumn Moon

Is the moon different in autumn?  I have no hard evidence, only inklings.  I am one of those who is lucky enough to have fond childhood memories of the sight and smell of piles of raked-up burning leaves.  Am I deceiving myself, or did a large yellow-orange waxing moon rise each year through the bare branches of the oaks and elms as the leaves smoldered up and down the block?  In 1964, for instance, the moon reached its first quarter on October 13 and was full on October 21.  The time frame fits.  Might this be a tantalizing clue?  Perhaps I am not imagining things.

Samuel Palmer, "Moonlight, a Landscape with Sheep" (c. 1831)

                    Autumn

A touch of cold in the Autumn night --
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

T. E. Hulme, in A. R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme (1960).

As I have suggested before, wistfulness is an (the?) essential component of autumn.  Thus, "the wistful stars" (line 6) seems right.

Hulme wrote only a handful of poems (40 or so, by my count).  He is best known for the influence of his aesthetic and philosophic thoughts and writings on budding "modernists" such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.  On September 28, 1917, he was killed in Flanders by the blast from an artillery shell.  He was 34.

Samuel Palmer, "Shepherds under a Full Moon"

                    The Moon

There is such loneliness in that gold.
The moon of the nights is not the moon
Whom the first Adam saw.  The long centuries
Of human vigil have filled her
With ancient lament.  Look at her.  She is your mirror.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Willis Barnstone), Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).

Samuel Palmer, "Late Twilight"

As is often the case, Japanese and Chinese poets have a way of perfectly summing things up in a matter-of-fact and direct fashion.  But, as always, the calm surface covers deep depths.

     Down from the mountain,
The moon
     Accompanied me,
And when I opened the gate,
The moon too entered.

Okuma Kotomichi (1798-1868), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn  (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 388.

The form of the poem is a tanka (often referred to nowadays as a waka), which consists of five phrases (usually rendered into separate lines in English translations), with a syllable count per line of 5-7-5-7-7.

Samuel Palmer, "Harvest Moon" (c. 1831)

"The Planet On The Table" Revisited

About a year or so ago, I came across the following poem by T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) and immediately thought of Wallace Stevens's "The Planet on the Table" (which appeared in my previous post).  Hulme died in World War I (in September of 1917 at the age of 34).   He wrote only a few poems during his short life.  All of them are brief and "imagistic."

He is perhaps better known for his critical and philosophical writings and for his out-sized personality, which had quite an impact on the early 20th-century "modernists" (e.g., Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and others).  Interestingly (and on an entirely different literary front), Hulme and Robert Frost got to know each other when Frost was living in England from 1912 to 1914.

                      Eliot Hodgkin, "Nine Peaches in a Paper Bag" (1961)

                         The Poet

Over a large table, smooth, he leaned in ecstasies,
In a dream.
He had been to woods, and talked and walked with trees.
Had left the world
And brought back round globes and stone images,
Of gems, colours, hard and definite.
With these he played, in a dream,
On the smooth table.

T. E. Hulme, in Alun Jones, The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme (1960), page 163.

"The Poet" sounds like a poem that Stevens could have written.  It is interesting to see the two poets exploring similar territory.  The common theme in the poems is creation: in Stevens's words, "makings of [the] self" and "makings of the sun."  Hulme's suggestion that the act of creation is akin to being "in a dream" may find some parallel in Stevens's reference to "Ariel" (the sprite in Shakespeare's The Tempest) being the creator of his poems.  But I don't want to get too carried away with this sort of thing.  I just think that the two poems go well together.

                                Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Dead Leaves" (1963)