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 & 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:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins
Christopher J. Scalia offered a reflection on John Keats' poem to Autumn in The Wall Street Journal last week:
. . . Every September I read John Keats’s “To Autumn.” That tradition has special significance this season, the ode’s 200th anniversary.
I’ve loved “To Autumn” since I first read it in college. I was entranced then, as now, by the way in which the poem captures this season’s fleeting beauty. From its famous opening line (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”) to the quiet music of its final image (“gathering swallows twitter in the skies”), it evokes the delicate abundance of these weeks. Keats’s writing affects me the way the season itself does: I wish the poem would last longer even as I know its power lies in its brevity.
But 1819 would be his last year of writing poetry. The following February, Keats coughed up some blood. He knew what that meant. He wrote to a friend, “That drop of blood is my death-warrant;—I must die.” Keats moved to Rome in the hope that the climate would mitigate his tuberculosis. He died there in February 1821.
Keats had asked to have his headstone inscribed, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” An epitaph full of beauty—but, as 200 years have shown, not truth. The seasons turn, yet Keats reminds me still that fleeting splendor has a captivating power of its own.
To Autumn
Season of mists and
mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of
the maturing sun
Conspiring with him
how to load and bless
With fruit the vines
that round the thatch-eves 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 wind;
Or on a half-reap'd
furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume
of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath
and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a
gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head
across a brook;
Or by a cider-press,
with patient look,
Thou watchest the last
oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of
Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them,
thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds
bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the
stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful
choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river
sallows, 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;
And gathering swallows
twitter in the skies.
