The Poetry of Autumn, by Annie Finch

Here, (with grateful acknowledgements to the Poetry Foundation), is my contribution to our November members' evening on the subject of "The Fall of the Year" LY

The Poetry of Autumn
 by Annie Finch 

Forget spring. Fall is the season for poetry.

“The poetry of earth is never dead,” wrote John Keats, and yet that quintessential poet of autumn, his own life fading as the colors of his glory blazed and flew, was exquisitely alive to the season’s dying. His sleeping Autumn, cheeks flushed and hair awry, personifies the sensual richness of the early part of the season as iconically as the yellow leaves of Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXXIII embody the forlorn grandeur of the late. And yet both of these poems contain the tinge of their opposites, more exquisite for being so subtle: the unspoken sexual passion in the sonnet and the hint of the ominous in the ode (the wailing of the bugs, the swallows gathering) are so delicate they are barely there.

Through just this kind of sensitivity to duality, the poetry of autumn tends to ambiguity—and to greatness. What poet or lover of poetry could resist, now, when death and beauty are afoot? Together? The stereotypical poet writes of spring; the odds are that any parody of poetry will involve twittering and budding. But Millay answers, from the end of “The Death of Autumn”: “Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky! / Oh, Autumn! Autumn—What is the Spring to me?”

The evidence for the greatness of autumn poetry, at least in the Romantic tradition in English, is everywhere: Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Keats’s “To Autumn,” Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole,” H.D.’s “Orchard,” Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn,” Brooks’s “Beverly Hills, Chicago.” Dickinson seemed to take the connection between poetry and autumn for granted, writing “Besides the Autumn poets sing / a few prosaic days” as if it were as standard a subject for poetry in her mind as spring is in ours. It seems likely that her own “Wild nights - Wild nights!,” not to mention its ancient ancestor, “O Western Wind,” was inspired by late autumn, by the kind of mood when Rilke wrote, “Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter; / who lives alone will live indefinitely so.”

Rilke’s poem partakes of the tradition of relentless autumn poems, those sad or bitter mournings of the season, the “withered” world on which Alice Cary so utterly turns her back. This is the aspect of autumn that drives Walter de la Mare, in “Autumn,” to spell-like obsession:

    There is a wind where the rose was;

    Cold rain where sweet grass was . . .

    Sad winds where your voice was;

    Tears, tears where my heart was . . .

It drives Paul Verlaine to hear such long long sobs, and most brutally of all perhaps, Adam Zagajewski to political despair at the power of autumn “merciless in her blaze / and her breath.”

On the other end of the spectrum are the few stalwart, happy autumn poems. These seem, interestingly enough, more common among American than among English poets. Could it be the sheer beauty of a more heavily wooded landscape that tips the balance? Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Merry Autumn,” one of the most successful happy autumn poems, consciously calls up the “solemn” tradition it rejects:

    It's all a farce,—these tales they tell

    About the breezes sighing,

    And moans astir o'er field and dell,

    Because the year is dying.

Emily Dickinson’s “The morns are meeker than they were,” uncharacteristic of her as it may be, is utterly memorable, and Whitman basks in autumn with benign acceptance, feeling its rivulets flowing towards an eternal ocean. Longfellow, not at his best in his ruthlessly cheerful poem “Autumn,” more than makes up for it at the gorgeous beginning of Book 2 of his now-underappreciated, but still highly readable, epic Evangeline:

    Now had the season returned, when the nights grow colder and

        longer,

    And the retreating sun the sign of the Scorpion enters.

    Birds of passage sailed through the leaden air, from the

        ice-bound

    Desolate northern bays to the shores of tropical islands.

    Harvests were gathered in; and wild with the winds of September

    Wrestled the trees of the forest, as Jacob of old with the angel.

But poems of lament or celebration are the exceptions; the real tradition of the poetry of autumn is the paradoxical tradition. Where does paradox find its proper home but in poetry, and in autumn? From Shakespeare’s sonnet to Keats’s ode and far beyond, much of the most memorable autumn poetry embraces what Stevens called “the blaze of summer straw in winter’s nick,” that balance between fecundity and decay which Frost addresses with such excruciating specificity in “After Apple-Picking”:

    Magnified apples appear and disappear,

    Stem end and blossom end,

    And every fleck of russet showing clear. . . .

    I am overtired

    Of the great harvest I myself desired.

This paradox, I think, is the pith of autumn, the part that some of us just can’t get enough of, the reason autumn is so many people’s favorite season. This is the ineffable puzzle that inspires Stevens’s “gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights” and leads Archibald MacLeish to call autumn “the human season.” This is the time when, perhaps, we are all looking to feel more accurately what Mary Kinzie, in her commentary on Rilke’s “Day in Autumn,” described as “the flowering of loss, . . . the ripening of diminishment into husk and hull.” And in this, autumn is again like poetry: though it may help us to notice more deeply how we are alone, it can also help us to feel the excitement of sharing that solitude with each other. In the words of Basho,

    It is deep autumn

    My neighbor

    How does he live, I wonder.

Originally Published: October 28th, 2009

Annie Finch is the author or editor of more than twenty books of poetry, plays, translation, literary essays, textbooks, and anthologies. Here is a link to a fuller biographical note, again from the Poetry Foundation website: CLICK HERE

She is related to Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea,  a noted poet of the late 17th/early18th century. For more on her,  

CLICK HERE

Poetry by Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie)

Our October speaker, Lord Gawain Douglas, has kindly suggested the following examples of his great-uncle's poems to supplement Bill Doherty's account, (see below), of his talk to the Society in October:

THE DEAD POET

I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face

All radiant and unshadowed of distress

And as of old, in music measureless,

I heard his golden voice and marked him trace

Under the common thing the hidden grace,

And conjure wonder out of emptiness,

Till mean things put on beauty like a dress

And all the world was an enchanted place.

And then methought outside a fast locked gate

I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,

Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,

Wonders that might have been articulate,

And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds

And so I woke and knew that he was dead.

Paris, 1901

(Written about Oscar Wilde a year after his death.)

THE WASTES OF TIME

If you came back, perhaps you would not find

The old enchantment, nor again discern

The altered face of love. The wheels yet tum

That clocked the wasted hours, the spirit’s wind

Still fans the embers in the hidden mind.

But if I cried to you, “Return! return!”

How could you come? How could you ever learn

The old ways you have left so far behind?

How sweetly, forged in sleep, come dreams that make

Swift wings and ships that sail the estranging sea,

Less roughly than blown rose-leaves in a bowl,

To harboured bliss. But oh! the pain to wake

In empty night seeking what may not he

Till the dead flesh set free the living soul.

 February 1934

 

Literary Society Meeting: 18 October 2019 by Bill Doherty

Oscar Wilde  and the Black Douglas  18/10/19

Lord Gawain Douglas

Counter-intuitively, in view of his most recent appearance at the Lit. Soc. – characterised by an impassioned  recital of a series of poems from memory – Lord Gawain Douglas introduced this talk with a medieval Northumbrian lullaby assuring a young child that they need not fret as Gawain’s ancestor, the original Black Douglas, would not get him. This boon companion of Robert Bruce and hero of Scotland’s 14^th century Wars of Independence acquired the sombre epithet either from a sallow complexion or the belief that even in that notoriously violent age, Sir James Douglas was particularly bad for your health. Our speaker is a scion of a line of the Douglas clan which assumed centre stage in the history of

mid-17^th century Scotland and acquired the title Marquess of Queensbury. Some might argue that  lineal descendants the 9^th Marquess, of Rules of Boxing fame and Gawain’s great-grandfather, and his son, Lord Alfred Douglas ( Gawain’s great-uncle), might have represented a revived Black Douglas menace. Both were  active principals in the 1895 libel trial featuring Oscar Wilde which scandalised respectable late-Victorian England.   

We received a brisk background summary of the case explaining that a  handsome recent Oxford undergraduate with literary aspirations, Lord Alfred Douglas,  was introduced to the prominent man of letters, Wilde, in 1891. Although Oscar was 20 years older and married, the pair plunged into an illegal, homosexual love affair which came under very public scrutiny when Alfred’s father, the 9^th Marquess of Queensbury, goaded Wilde into opening libel proceedings, with public accusations of sodomy. Although Wilde abandoned the case mid-trial, evidence had emerged of his consorting with male prostitutes and he was subsequently charged with, tried for and convicted of gross indecency which resulted in a sentence of 2 years imprisonment with hard labour. After brief interludes in Pentonville and Wandsworth, he served the last 18 months of his sentence in Reading prison.  

In the contemporary spirit of reputation management, our speaker sketched out his mission to rescue his great-uncle from the opprobrium incurred after the trial where some felt he had ruined Oscar and to advance Lord Alfred or “Bosie’s” claims to greater appreciation of his poetry. He currently languishes at 275^th in all poetry.com’s “500 Greatest Poets”. These goals are broadly in line with those of Douglas Murray’s biography, “Bosie”, published in 2000. 

We learnt that although Bosie never visited the prisoner, he remained loyal to Wilde and even petitioned Queen Victoria on his behalf. Once granted writing materials, Oscar penned a 50,000 word missive to Alfred eventually entitled “De Profundis” after the opening line of Psalm 130, “Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord”. This was to be given to Douglas by the journalist and a  former lover of both Wilde and Douglas, Robbie Ross. For a suggested variety of reasons, Bosie never read this until it surfaced inopportunely in his later career as a serial litigant when he had Arthur Ransome arraigned for libel over Ransome’s book on Wilde. “De Profundis” was described as the greatest character assassination of all time – “Yet each man kills the thing he loves”? Oscar and “Bosie’s” relationship survived these explosive opinions and they spent Wilde’s last 2 years on the Continent together. 

Within a year of Oscar’s death (1900), Alfred had written in his favoured sonnet format “The Dead Poet” which opens with him dreaming of Wilde and ends in bathos – “And so I awoke and knew that he was dead.”   The death of someone close inspired another of his better poems “In Memoriam”, another sonnet “…the tribute of a song …” dedicated to his admired, elder brother, Francis, who died accidentally at a shoot in 1894, albeit with rumours of a homosexual liaison with the then Home Secretary and future Liberal Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, hanging over him. Some critics disparagingly class earlier poems in W.S.Gilbert terms as “…greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery…” stuff suffused with the immature synthetic melancholy of autumn leaves and winter sunsets.  

“Bosie’s” life followed an eventful if erratic course after Wilde’s death with conversion to Roman Catholicism, marriage to the bisexual Olive Custance, fatherhood, bankruptcy and lawsuits. The strangest of these came when, apparently influenced by a current of opinion which held that Britain’s Great War effort had been impeded by a coven of Germanophile homosexuals buried within the Deep State, he accused Winston Churchill and “the Jews” of murdering Lord Kitchener and trying to “throw” the Battle of Jutland. Churchill sued for criminal libel and Douglas was sentenced to 6 months in Wormwood Scrubs. There, he wrote the remarkable 17 canto “In Excelsis”, possibly a conscious contrast to Wilde’s prison oeuvre “De Profundis”, This reads more like an “Apologia pro Vita Sua” in which he lauds chastity, denounces Wilde for leading him astray, flays “the Jews” and “ bought” politicians but concludes with the defiant line “I will never bend the Douglas knee to Baal.”   Although latterly informally separated from Olive, the pair quietly lived out their lives as amicable neighbours in Sussex, “Hove, actually”, till their deaths in 1944 (Olive) and 1945 (Alfred).  

The Lit. Soc. audience clearly appreciated another entertaining Gawain Douglas performance complete with trademark verve, vigour and concentration.  He had referred to his mad, bad family during the presentation but none of his questioners asked if he had sought genome testing. Still the family history is fascinating.