Autumn Poems: Add YOUR Favorites!
The Pumpkin Spice Latte is back on the Starbucks menu, a sure sign that autumn is almost here (it actually begins on Tuesday). To help celebrate the season, I've collected excerpts from some of my favorite autumn poems below. SCROLL DOWN TO ADD YOUR FAVORITES!
John Keats, who is in the news these days thanks to Jane Campion's new movie Bright Star, wrote one his four great odes to the season. The first stanza of "Ode to Autumn" is so rich with images of ripening that it seems on the verge of bursting from its lines:
SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease;
For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats's fellow romantic wunderkind, used the autumn as a metaphor for inspiration and revolution in "Ode to the West Wind." While Keats's ode moves at a somnolent pace, Shelley's poem is fast-moving and electric.
O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill;
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!
In stark contrast to the rich treatment of autumn by the two Romantics, E. E. Cummings focused on (and imitated) the action of a falling leaf in this clever and artful poem.
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
It might help you to see the poem "unbroken," in which case it reads: "l(a leaf falls) oneliness." Cummings wrote the sentence so that the action of a leaf falling is actually contained within the word "loneliness." And you can see how skilled he was at using line breaks and spacing to create an effect.
Robert Frost--perhaps America's best nature poet--uses the autumn as a metaphor for beauty's impermanence in the short lyric "Nothing Gold Can Stay."
Nature's first green is gold,
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.
Finally, here's "A Vagabond Song" by the Canadian poet Bliss Carman. In it, Carman highlights the connection he feels to autumn, and how it appeals to the wanderer in him.
There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood--
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.
There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.
You can read more autumn poems here.
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At the End of This Summer
I wonder if I frightened you,
Coming as I did from behind
As you sat alone in your chair
With the low sun melting over your head.
I couldn't imagine what you were
Looking at or thinking of--
You who have always been so lively
And little given to quiet--
And the desire to bend and kiss your hair
Was almost unbearable.
You turned,
With that air of half-astonishment
You use so well, I smiled a greeting.
After that, we sat and talked for a while
And enjoyed the departing light.
Then the warmth was gone,
And we rose, I to take my leave, and you
To close the door and pull the shade,
And turn to the lighting of a lamp,
The starting of a fire in the stove.
-- John Haines
When I saw the title of this thread, the first thing I thought of was, "Nothing Gold can Stay." Nice to see HuffPo beat me to it.
autumn begins--
I thought by now this journey
would've ended
"I CRIED over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts..."
-Carl Sandburg
Read more: http://ame
Went to rite-aid to buy my beer
The Christmas decorations were already there
But it's only September, I said to the clerk;
She said seasons greetings, and I felt like a jerk.
autumn is for raking leaves
that have fallen from the trees
and saying goodbye birds and bees
who have left for warmer seas
Fall is nice
like pumkin spice
winter sucks
like a hockey puck
spring is neat
the flowers are so sweet
Summer is scratchy
the ticks and chiggers are nasty
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all year.
The last of the geese head south, flying in lonely flocks.
I am aware of the autumn stretching all the way before me.
The mountains are stripped of leaves after the icy shower.
Far away, a village lies asleep, lit by the declining sun.
- from The Zen Poems of Ryokan,
selected and translated with an introduction, biographical sketch and notes by
Nobuyuki Yuasa
Princeton University Press
To Autumn
O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stainèd
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.
`The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust'ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.
`The spirits of the air live on the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.'
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat;
Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.
William Blake
Thanks I like this poetry idea!
[corrected version]
Autumn...
Crisp voices pierce the sudden frost...
Soft emotions hover, and are almost lost.
Old memories warm the breast...
As the fruits of a Summer's labor ripen lest...
They be forgotten.
Michael J. Murphy (casamurphy)
OCTOBER
~ William Cullen Bryant
Ay, thou art welcome, heaven's delicious breath!
When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf,
And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief
And the year smiles as it draws near its death.
Wind of the sunny south! oh, still delay
In the gay woods and in the golden air,
Like to a good old age released from care,
Journeying, in long serenity, away.
In such a bright, late quiet, would that I
Might wear out life like thee, 'mid bowers and brooks
And dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks,
And music of kind voices ever nigh;
And when my last sand twinkled in the glass,
Pass silently from men, as thou dost pass.
OCTOBER
~ Elinor Wylie
Beauty has a tarnished dress,
And a patchwork cloak of cloth
Dipped deep in mournfulness,
Striped like a moth.
Wet grass where it trails
Dyes it green along the hem;
She has seven silver veils
With cracked bells on them.
She is tired of all these--
Grey gauze, translucent lawn;
The broad cloak of Herakles.
Is tangled flame and fawn.
Water and light are wearing thin:
She has drawn above her head
The warm enormous lion skin
Rough red and gold.
AUTUMN
~ John Clare
The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.
The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,
The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.
The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.
Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we're eyeing burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
A Leaf Treader (excerpt)
I have been treading on leaves all day until I am autumn-tired.
God knows all the color and form of leaves I have trodden on and mired.
Perhaps I have put forth too much strength and been too fierce from fear.
I have safely trodden underfoot the dead leaves of another year.
[Robert Frost]
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