75 Autumn poems

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock, And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock, And the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens, And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence; O, it’s then’s the times a feller is a-feelin’ at his best, With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest, As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock, When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock. They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here— Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees, And the mumble of the hummin’-birds and buzzin’ of the bees; But the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock— When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock. The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn, And the raspin’ of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn; The stubble in the furries—kindo’ lonesome-like, but still A-preachin’ sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill; The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed; The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover over-head!— O, it sets my hart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock, When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock! Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps; And your cider-makin’ ’s over, and your wimmern-folks is through With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and saussage, too! ... I don’t know how to tell it—but ef sich a thing could be As the Angels wantin’ boardin’, and they’d call around on me— I’d want to ’commodate ’em—all the whole-indurin’ flock— When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!

1 The autumn shade is thin. Grey leaves lie faint Where they will lie, and, where the thick green was, Light stands up, like a presence, to the sky. The trees seem merely shadows of its age. From off the hill, I hear the logging crew, The furious and indifferent saw, the slow Response of heavy pine; and I recall That goddesses have died when their trees died. Often in summer, drinking from the spring, I sensed in its cool breath and in its voice A living form, darker than any shade And without feature, passionate, yet chill With lust to fix in ice the buoyant rim— Ancient of days, the mother of us all. Now, toward his destined passion there, the strong, Vivid young man, reluctant, may return From suffering in his own experience To lie down in the darkness. In this time, I stay in doors. I do my work. I sleep. Each morning, when I wake, I assent to wake. The shadow of my fist moves on this page, Though, even now, in the wood, beneath a bank, Coiled in the leaves and cooling rocks, the snake Does as it must, and sinks into the cold. 2 Nights grow colder. The Hunter and the Bear Follow their tranquil course outside my window. I feel the gentian waiting in the wood, Blossoms waxy and blue, and blue-green stems Of the amaryllis waiting in the garden. I know, as though I waited what they wait, The cold that fastens ice about the root, A heavenly form, the same in all its changes, Inimitable, terrible, and still, And beautiful as frost. Fire warms my room. Its light declares my books and pictures. Gently, A dead soprano sings Mozart and Bach. I drink bourbon, then go to bed, and sleep In the Promethean heat of summer’s essence. 3 Awakened by some fear, I watch the sky. Compelled as though by purposes they know, The stars, in their blue distance, still affirm The bond of heaven and earth, the ancient way. This old assurance haunts small creatures, dazed In icy mud, though cold may freeze them there And leave them as they are all summer long. I cannot sleep. Passion and consequence, The brutal given, and all I have desired Evade me, and the lucid majesty That warmed the dull barbarian to life. So I lie here, left with self-consciousness, Enemy whom I love but whom his change And his forgetfulness again compel, Impassioned, toward my lost indifference, Faithful, but to an absence. Who shares my bed? Who lies beside me, certain of his waking, Led sleeping, by his own dream, to the day? 4 If I ask you, angel, will you come and lead This ache to speech, or carry me, like a child, To riot? Ever young, you come of age Remote, a pledge of distances, this pang I notice at dusk, watching you subside From tree-tops and from fields. Mysterious self, Image of the fabulous alien, Even in sleep you summon me, even there, When, under his native tree, Odysseus hears His own incredible past and future, whispered By wisdom, but by wisdom in disguise. 5 Thinking of a bravura deed, a place Sacred to a divinity, an old Verse that seems new, I postulate a man Mastered by his own image of himself. Who is it says, I am? Sensuous angel, Vessel of nerve and blood, the impoverished heir Of an awareness other than his own? Not these, but one to come? For there he is, In a steel helmet, raging, fearing his death, Carrying bread and water to a quiet, Placing ten sounds together in one sound: Confirming his election, or merely still, Sleeping, or in a colloquy with the sun. 6 Snow and then rain. The roads are wet. A car Slips and strains in the mire, and I remember Driving in France: weapons-carriers and jeeps; Our clothes and bodies stiffened by mud; our minds Diverted from fear. We labor. Overhead, A plane, Berlin or Frankfurt, now New York. The car pulls clear. My neighbor smiles. He is old. Was this our wisdom, simply, in a chance, In danger, to be mastered by a task, Like groping round a chair, through a door, to bed? 7 A dormant season, and, under the dripping tree, Not sovereign, ordering nothing, letting the past Do with me as it will, I savor place And weather, air and sun. Though Hercules Confronts his nature in his deed, repeats His purposes, and is his will, intact, Magnificent, and memorable, I try The simplest forms of our old poverty. I seek no end appointed in my absence Beyond the silence I already share. 8 I drive home with the books that I will read. The streets are harsh with traffic. Where I once Played as a boy amid old stands of pine, Row after row of houses. Lined by the new Debris of wealth and power, the broken road. Then miles of red clay bank and frugal ground. At last, in the minor hills, my father’s place, Where I can find my way as in a thought— Gardens, the trees we planted, all we share. A Cherokee trail runs north to summer hunting. I see it, when I look up from the page. 9 In nameless warmth, sun light in every corner, Bending my body over my glowing book, I share the room. Is it with a voice or touch Or look, as of an absence, learned by love, Now, merely mine? Annunciation, specter Of the worn out, lost, or broken, telling what future. What vivid loss to come, you change the room And him who reads here. Restless, he will stir, Look round, and see the room renewed and line, Color, and shape as, in desire, they are, Not shadows but substantial light, explicit, Bright as glass, inexhaustible, and true. 1O My shadow moves, until, at noon, I stand Within its seal, as in the finished past. But in the place where effect and cause are joined, In the warmth or cold of my remembering, Of love, of partial freedom, the time to be Trembles and glitters again in windy light. For nothing is disposed. The slow soft wind Tilting the blood-root keeps its gentle edge. The intimate cry, both sinister and tender, Once heard, is heard confined in its reserve. My image of myself, apart, informed By many deaths, resists me, and I stay Almost as I have been, intact, aware, Alive, though proud and cautious, even afraid.

In my great grandmother's time, All one needed was a broom To get to see places And give the geese a chase in the sky. • The stars know everything, So we try to read their minds. As distant as they are, We choose to whisper in their presence. • Oh Cynthia, Take a clock that has lost its hands For a ride. Get me a room at Hotel Eternity Where Time likes to stop now and then. • Come, lovers of dark corners, The sky says, And sit in one of my dark corners. There are tasty little zeroes In the peanut dish tonight.

It is autumn but early. No crow cries from the dry woods. The house droops like an eyelid over the leprous hill. In the bald barnyard one horse, a collection of angles Cuts at the flies with a spectral tail. A blind man’s Sentence, the road goes on. Lifts as the slope lifts it. Comes now one who has been conquered By all he sees. And asks what—would have what— Poor fool, frail, this man, mistake, my hero? More than the hands on the lines and the back aching, The daily wrestle with the angel in the south forty, More than this forever lonely round Round hunger and impotence, the prickly pair: Banker or broker can have dreamed no fate More bankrupt than this godlike heresy Which asks of love more leave than extended credit, Needs comradeship more than a psalm or surely these Worn acres even if over them Those trained to it see signs of they say God.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring Conspiring Working together; literally, to conspire is “to breathe together” (OED) with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves thatch-eves Thatch-eaves, the edge of thatched roofs 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'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing winnowing Separating the wheat from the chaff, the heavy from the light wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook hook Scythe Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner gleaner One who gathers the remaining food after the reaper has harvested the field thou dost keep Steady thy laden laden Loaded down head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? Where are they? Rhetorical convention known as ubi sunt , often appearing in poems that meditate on the transitory nature of life and the inevitability of death. Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom bloom “to colour with a soft warm tint or glow” (OED) the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains stubble-plains Fields made up of stubble, the remaining stumps of grain left after reaping with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows sallows Willow trees , 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 red-breast whistles from a garden-croft garden-croft A croft is a small enclosed field ; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Among the signs of autumn I perceive The Roman wormwood (called by learned men Ambrosia elatior, food for gods,— For to impartial science the humblest weed Is as immortal once as the proudest flower—) Sprinkles its yellow dust over my shoes As I cross the now neglected garden. —We trample under foot the food of gods And spill their nectar in each drop of dew— My honest shoes, fast friends that never stray Far from my couch, thus powdered, countryfied, Bearing many a mile the marks of their adventure, At the post-house disgrace the Gallic gloss Of those well dressed ones who no morning dew Nor Roman wormwood ever have been through, Who never walk but are transported rather— For what old crime of theirs I do not gather.

I spot the hills With yellow balls in autumn. I light the prairie cornfields Orange and tawny gold clusters And I am called pumpkins. On the last of October When dusk is fallen Children join hands And circle round me Singing ghost songs And love to the harvest moon; I am a jack-o'-lantern With terrible teeth And the children know I am fooling.

While one sere leaf, that parting Autumn yields, Trembles upon the thin, and naked spray, November, dragging on this sunless day, Lours, cold and sullen, on the watery fields; And Nature to the waste dominion yields, Stripped her last robes, with gold and purple gay — So droops my life, of your soft beams despoiled, Youth, Health, and Hope, that long exulting smiled; And the wild carols, and the bloomy hues Of merry Spring-time, spruce on every plain Her half-blown bushes, moist with sunny rain, More pensive thoughts in my sunk heart infuse Than Winter’s grey, and desolate domain Faded like my lost Youth, that no bright Spring renews.

Behold that tree, in Autumn’s dim decay, Stripped by the frequent, chill, and eddying wind; Where yet some yellow, lonely leaves we find Lingering and trembling on the naked spray, Twenty, perchance, for millions whirled away! Emblem, also! too just, of humankind! Vain man expects longevity, designed For few indeed; and their protracted day What is it worth that Wisdom does not scorn? The blasts of sickness, care, and grief appal, That laid the friends in dust, whose natal morn Rose near their own; and solemn is the call; Yet, like those weak deserted leaves forlorn, Shivering they cling to life, and fear to fall!

to a young child Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you wíll weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It ís the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.