Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors ...

September 20, 2009 7:25 AM

Tell me of your favorite poem to welcome the autumn.

This Tuesday, September 22nd, is the Autumn Equinox. I like to read & learn of new poems whenever a new season turns, and then share them with my family & friends.

So! Tell me of your favorite poem to welcome the autumn. As with a similar question previously, it doesn't have to be about autumn directly - themes of harvest & feasting, of balance, of memory & remembrance, etc., are all welcome. For example, Rainer Maria Rilke's Sunset is a poem that powerfully evokes autumn for me.

posted by jammy to writing & language (22 comments total)

They don't come much better than Keats's To Autumn.
posted by cerebus19 at 7:35 AM on September 20 [3 favorites has favorites]

Or Shelley's Ode to the West Wind.
posted by Pallas Athena at 7:47 AM on September 20

Something told the Wild Geese, In the Penny Candy Store Beyond the El
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 7:51 AM on September 20

I like John Clare's "Autumn" (1821). There is also a nice, meditative video with beautiful pictures to go with some of the stanzas.
posted by Matthias Rascher at 7:54 AM on September 20

Latest favourite: Rilke's Lord, It Is Time
posted by kalimac at 8:00 AM on September 20

When I think of poems that honor the changing of the seasons, I think of this Onion piece about the works of Virgil.
posted by johngoren at 8:58 AM on September 20

If autumn is conventionally seen as a little dying before life springs anew, then there is no better exemplar of this mixture of death and sex than Jorie Graham's "Salmon" (the essential autumn animal)

I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room half-way through
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty,
archaic,
not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper
into less..............

posted by Rumple at 9:25 AM on September 20 [1 favorite has favorites]

Four by Carl Sandburg:
Whitelight
Under the Harvest Moon
Autumn Movement
and the third part of Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn:
Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams.
Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.
posted by crush-onastick at 9:49 AM on September 20

It's not exactly a poem, but Brewer and Shipley's "Indian Summer" is essential autumn listening for me.
posted by jferg at 11:17 AM on September 20

Poem in October, by Dylan Thomas.
posted by prefpara at 11:47 AM on September 20

(thank you for encouraging me to get out my book of poetry today!)

The Autumn by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The Song of the Chrysanthemum ~Nora Perry, 19th Century

At last I have come to my throne.
No more, despised and unknown,
In gardens forlorn
My blossoms are born;
No mroe in some corner obscure
Do I drearily, sadly endure
The withering blight
Of neglect and of slight;
Oh, long have I waited and late,
For this fair and slow-coming fate,
Which the years have foretold
As they sighingly rolled.
Oh, long have I waited and lone;
But at last, on my blossomy throne,
The world doth declare
I am fairest of fair,
And queen of the autumn I reign,
With a sway that none may disdain, -
I, once who did stand,
Despised in the land.
posted by Sassyfras at 11:50 AM on September 20 [1 favorite has favorites]

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as 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 will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
1880
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:31 PM on September 20 [2 favorites has favorites]

The Keats is my favorite. "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, OH" by James Wright has always grabbed me, too.
posted by katie at 1:37 PM on September 20 [1 favorite has favorites]

Another good one, W.B. Yeats's "The Falling of the Leaves":

Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.

The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.

posted by cerebus19 at 3:00 PM on September 20

Wallace Stevens' "The Auroras of Autumn." Link is to a voice recording — apologies, couldn't find the text online. Ruminations on art and aging, times past and to come; vatic stuff from one of America's best.
posted by Haruspex at 3:47 PM on September 20

"Mists and Rain" by Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs due Mal

(this is my 2nd favorite translation, the other I can't locate but I'll post if I find it.)


Late autumns, winters, springtimes steeped in mud,
You, drowsy seasons, earn my gratuitude
For so enveloping my heart and mind
With vaporous winding-sheet, grave undefined.

On this vast plain where storms blow cold and rude,
Where weathercocks rust under hanging clouds,
My soul, more than in April, is inclined
To open wide its swart wings to the wind.

Nothing is sweeter to a mournful soul,
On whom the hoar-frost fell in distant times,
O sallow seasons, sovereigns of our climes,

Than seeing evermore your shadows pale,
- Unless, on moonless nights, and not alone,
On some chance bed one finds oblivion.



And Robert Frost's "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.
posted by hellboundforcheddar at 4:56 PM on September 20 [1 favorite has favorites]

Another one from Frost: "Gathering Leaves." Not nearly as good as hellboundforcheddar's selection, but I always think of it this time of year.
posted by Knappster at 6:55 PM on September 20

I was looking through all the references to autumn in The Tale of Genji, and found something else:

The passing shower’s raindrops
Still droop from the needles of the pines,
Mists rise in the lonesome autumn dusk

村雨の　
露もまだひぬ　
まきの葉に　
霧たちのぼる　
秋の夕暮れ

The Monk Jakuren (Fujiwara no Sadanaga) (1139-1202)
posted by HopperFan at 9:42 PM on September 20

Bavarian Gentiums by DH Lawrence. It's lovely to read out loud.

Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.


from:

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/77.html
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 5:17 AM on September 21

Bavarian Gentians I mean, ye gods I am an idiot sometimes.
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 5:17 AM on September 21

Poetry Foundation suggests poems that are "ideal to read as the weather gets colder."
posted by woodway at 8:15 PM on September 21

wow! thank you everyone - what a cornucopia

in gratitude, here's one in return:

Fall Song by Mary Oliver

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

posted by jammy at 6:51 AM on September 22 [1 favorite has favorites]