Dear Readers,
Are you partial to poetry?
Last week as I sat napping under an oak tree, an acorn hit me on the head.
Dismissing the possibility that it had fallen on its own — this was, after all, still summer and acorns don’t start dropping until the fall — I blamed it on the squirrel who had been battling me for control of the bird feeder all season; he was seeking revenge.
But then I looked across the lake and saw that indeed, the maple leaves along the opposite shore were beginning to turn to orange. In a sudden, surprising rush of bittersweet melancholy, the words to a poem by Robert Frost came back to me:
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.
An unscientific survey of the most common topics for verse reveals the number one subject inspiring poets throughout the ages has been love — no surprise there — followed closely in second place by autumn. I wonder why. What is it about fall, dear Readers, which evokes this expression in the arts?
There must be some deep-seated emotions at play which overwhelm the heart and spill over onto the written page. It can’t be just the glory of the blazing reds and yellows; nor can it be only the refreshing briskness in the air or the excitement of the football season, because most all the autumn poetry we encounter describes the joy of the season’s colorful arrival tainted by the sadness of its looming loss.
William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 reads, in part:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In “A Sunset of the City,” Gwendolyn Brooks laments:
It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.
As we get older, we welcome the beauty of autumn but at the same time we experience an underlying fear of what we know must follow; autumn prepares us for winter, for death — the death of the farm field, the death of the year. And somehow, the shadows of the loss of our own lives seem much closer in the fall.
In that famous “Nothing Gold Can Stay” poem, Frost uses the cycle of nature to represent the notion that all the good and beautiful things in this life will eventually fade away, and although that is certainly true (even Ecclesiastes tells us, “Vanities, vanities, all things are vanities!”), I wish he would have added two more lines about the NEXT life.
Perhaps a short stanza acknowledging that although nothing gold can stay in this earthly life, in the next life, the streets are all paved in gold, a gold that will never fade! (cf. Rev. 21:21)
In another famous poem, “An Essay on Man,” Alexander Pope urges us to remember that “hope springs eternal.”
So, when earthly autumn turns to winter, we should take comfort in knowing that spring will be the next to arrive; when we are faced with the winter of our lives, we can find hope in God’s promise that the golden glow of autumn in us will be purified, reflected and magnified in God’s love — no winter chill or darkness in heaven!
And so, with apologies to Frost and Shakespeare, may I humbly submit, for your consideration, dear Readers, my own “September Psalm”
Fear not! the turn of the
calendar page
Announcing that it’s fall;
Fear not! the birds that have all flown south
Taking with them their call.
Fear not! the skies that turned to grey
Or the barren earth
that’s brown,
For in the change of seasons
There’s a promise to be found.
Rejoice! For God assures us
That this autumn here on earth
Is but a mere transition to the
Season of our rebirth!
Rejoice! And take great comfort
In all that’s been foretold,
All earthly things
must fade away,
But heaven is
permanently gold!
Linda E. Kelly is a member of Blessed Sacrament Parish in Madison.