The Poetry of Autumn

In the other gardens
And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!
...R.L. Stevenson Autumn Fires

Oct 26, 2009

David B. Hart

Excerpt:

Perhaps it’s only because I come from the east coast of North America that I think fall the most poetical of months. Of course, every season is a season for poetry, and every season has been the subject of poetry; but I tend to think of this time of year as the most intrinsically poetic in nature. This may just be because of the contrasts in color: all that purple, crimson, scarlet, orange, cadmium, gold, and so forth, shifting and intermingling against a backdrop of luminous gray; it all seems like such a perfect coincidence of gaiety and melancholy, exuberance and death. Or perhaps it’s because of a certain strange quality in the air that imbrues everything with an additional tincture of mystery: whole days washed in a kind of opaline twilight, the sun blanched to a cold silver by ubiquitous clouds, wood smoke floating through soft rains, and so on. Or perhaps it’s simply because, as the temperature drops, one spends more time inside, ideally by a fire, and so has more time to devote to reading poetry. the rest image by rkramer