September 29, 2019
By Linda Dove
Let’s now continue meditating on the season this lovely autumn morning. As the late Mary Oliver wrote:
Another year nearly gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows,…
My hope is that today we savor the moods that the season evokes in us. We’ll use the power of poetry to put us in touch with autumn’s beauty, its significance in the cycle of the seasons, and what I call its fragile holiness.
The late UU poet, Mark Doty, wrote that a still-life painting is a dialogue between the painter and the observer. The painter’s wish is that every still-life object is transformed into live feelings in us— smiles of pleasure, perhaps, or tears evoked by memories. In paying attention to how we respond, he says, we come to know ourselves more clearly.
This, I think, is as true for the language of poetry as for the visual arts. Poetry’s power can be felt like a glow in the heart or a kick in the gut. When a poem speaks to us emotionally we come closer to knowing who we are by our visceral responses to it.
Theme 1: Autumnal Beauty
First and foremost, the glory of autumn catches the attention of all of us and inspires poets.
In 1819, John Keats wrote a letter to a friend after harvest. ”How beautiful the season is now, he wrote. How fine the air — a temperate sharpness about it . . . . I never liked stubble-fields so much as now . . . . Somehow, a stubble plain looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.”
That walk inspired a poem and you alI recognize the famous first lines? “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom friend of the maturing sun.”
David is going to read for us the later part of that poem, To Autumn.
…Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
To Autumn: John Keats
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Robin taught this poem for many years and will be happy to tell you more about it if you ask him.
Of course, Autumn poetry has usually been about the beauty of the rural countryside and today this is fast disappearing. I suggest we now need more poems about autumn for city dwellers.
Theme 2: Seasonal Cycle
Many poems remind us of the seasonal circling from the new life of spring, to the energy of summer, to the transition of autumn, into the resting phase of winter.
When we were lighting the chalice, Robin read to us the first stanza of Immortal Autumn, a poem by Archie MacLeish. Chris is now going to read the rest of that poem for us (entire poem below).
I speak this poem now with grave and level voice
Immortal Autumn: Archibald MacLeish
In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.
I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.
I praise the fall: it is the human season.
Now no more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough,
But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows
Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:
There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn
Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes.
Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves
And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow
We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know
The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves.
It is the human season. On this sterile air
Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.
I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.
I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.
Autumn as Fall
Autumn isn’t called Fall for nothing here in the USA. The term comes from an ancient Germanic root and was once the common word for autumn in Britain, though no longer. Poetry is full of Fall symbolism. [François-René de] Chateaubriand wrote a prose poem as part of his Memoirs from the After-Life (Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe) in which Fall symbolizes how we often feel about our own lives. Elizabeth will read this in translation.
A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes;
Memoirs from the After-Life: Chateaubriand
the leaves falling like our years,
the flowers fading like our hours,
the clouds fleeting like our illusions,
the light diminishing like our intellect,
the sun growing colder like our affections,
the rivers becoming frozen like our lives—
all bear secret relations to our destinies.
And Dylan Thomas expressed a similar feeling in a metaphor in his Poem in October.
. . . And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days . . . .
I don’t know precisely what Thomas meant by “ in a shower of all my days” but somehow I can feel the soft rain falling on my head and the feelings Thomas put into those few words.
Theme 3: Transitional Change and Dissolution
The lyric poet Gregory Orr (UVA) describes the roles words play in helping us process painful emotions such as insecurity, sadness or grief. He calls this the existential necessity of poetry.
Autumn is the season when poets ask us to face change and dissolution as an inevitable part of life. Nancy Barbour will read a poem by Robert Frost that symbolizes this theme.
Nature’s first green is gold,
Nothing Gold Can Stay: Robert Frost
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Theme 4: Autumn and Climate
Many poets are writing now about the seasonal Fall as symbolic of climate change. An entire website has sprung up devoted to modifications of classic poems so that they address climate change. We only have time for one of these, an amusing and horrifying play on The Wild Swans at Coole by William Butler Yeats. Beryl will read.
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The Wild Swans at Coole: William Butler Yeats
The woodland paths are dry,
The woodland paths are way too dry.
It hasn’t rained in like two months;
There should be a lake here with
Brimming water and swans among the stones . . . .
My God they’re all dead.
Nine and fifty dehydrated, dead swans.
Poetry, what have you done?
You probably know that the DMS Manual 5 (for mental illness diagnosis and treatment) has a new classification. It labels the extreme grief many people are suffering over climate change as a mental health condition. Here is a cathartic little Elegy for the Planet. Trudy will read.
Earth Elegy
With no heart or mind for Earth’s sanctity
we roll time down treacherous paths,
driving the years to uncertainty.
Tree canopies strive to stand tall sentry
shielding the endangered soil,
reverencing its fertility.
But we hear the moans of choking skies.
We witness quakes and seas that roil,
cracks in ice as waters rise.
We must begin to listen to Earth’s gasping sighs
or we will leave behind this epitaph:
Humans neglected with All Life to empathize.
Martin Rowson is a British satirist and cartoonist for the Guardian newspaper. He says the term climate change does not kick us hard enough in the butt. So he proposes instead the term climate collapse. We’re looking at ‘systemic collapse’, he says,…our lungs collapse, financial systems collapse, and we collapse in exhaustion at the end of a difficult day. He thinks people can relate to that. He hopes this term will take off and help spur us to action. I think a poem entitled Climate Collapse is waiting to be written.
Theme 5: Poetry as Communal Pondering
Today the many voices of Black Lives Matter and MeToo poets are having a lot of impact, especially through the internet and live performances. The poets hope their words can help change our conversations about race and sexual violence, which in turn can help change our culture, and then our behavior and practices.
The poet Marilyn Nelson said that in “communal pondering” through reading poems together people can get a sense of collective connection. (I guess this would be much like, in earlier times, gathering round the piano to sing together). My hope is that, by making poetry more accessible and appealing to direct experience, poets can help everyone ponder on the beauty of the autumn, the meaning in the seasonal cycles, and the fragility of the holy planet. For this, as Mark Doty might have said, we need to pay attention so that all life does not become still life. We need to do everything we can to prevent our autumns collapsing into permanent winter.