Ah, Autumn!

Photo by Kareena Byrd

"Every leaf speaks bliss to me fluttering from the autumn tree"- Emily Bronte

It’s the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, to borrow Keats’ words. Autumn. An underrated season, in my view. In North India it’s lovely and cool, the nights are slowly getting colder and winter’s heralded in gently. I checked out references to this season in literature and found a profusion of rhapsodies in verse. Keats’ Ode to Autumn (1820) is famous. He focuses on the imagery of ripeness and fruit-laden bowers: ‘Fill all the fruit with ripeness to the core’, ‘to swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells’. In a letter to his friend Reynolds dated 22^nd September 1819, he gushes: “How beautiful the season is now. How fine the air- a temperate sharpness about it...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.” So that’s the background behind the lovely Ode to Autumn.

Shakespeare, writing over two hundred years before Keats, took a grim view of the season. His Sonnet 73 (1609) is rather morbid in its Autumn references. There’s a sense of things passing away. He talks of ‘bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’ and ‘death bed’ and ‘sunset fadeth in the west’. The concluding lines make things clearer:

‘This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.’

William Blake’s To Autumn (1783) surprised me with its romantic (to put it politely in case kids are reading) imagery. He sings about mature girls, ‘daughters of the year’ that shall dance and ‘sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers’. There’s a line about the ‘blood of the grape’ and how ‘the narrow bud opens her beauties to/ The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins...’ Phew.

Shelley used the season to kick start his hugely popular Ode to the West Wind (1820).

‘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...’

Throughout the poem there’s a sense of energy, power, a desire for freedom. No surprise that it appeared in his Prometheus Unbound volume of 1820. He added a note to this ode, revealing that the poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirt the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when ‘that tempestuous wind...was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains’.

Here's Eric Clapton's version of the Nat King Cole classic, Autumn Leaves