It's as if poets are obligated to write about the changing colours of autumn leaves, and they almost can't help but succumb to this ultimate cliché. But there's something about this season that is undeniably marked by reflection—on transitions, on the final flare of the year's abundance, on preparing the soul for the death of winter, on mortality.
Here's a week's worth of autumnal poems for you, one per day.
If you need a bit of prodding about the potency of poetry for the spiritual life, listen to this podcast interview by Image Journal. I repeatedly go back to a conversation between Scott Cairns and Malcolm Guite. They extend this meditation on language to how people engage with biblical texts, which are laden with poetry. Cairns says, 'Christians have tended to approach the text as if the words were obstacles to one set meaning behind them.' Instead, he argues that a more accurate way to read the scriptures according to the original context is by seeing passages as 'generative, continuing to produce meaning'. And so too with a poem.
There's a certain alive-ness to language. Resist rushing to analysis or trying to push back all the imagery and word pictures to get to the 'real meaning'. Let the stanzas below speak to you and have their effect on you, maybe in a way that surprises you. Reading poetry has sometimes been equated to an act of submission. You are exposing yourself to the generative forces of language and to the Revelations it’s calling forth.
A Short Guide to Reading Poetry
Less is more. Savour one poem in one sitting, if possible.
Linger and read it slowly, multiple times, until it settles over you.
Read it aloud—to and with people you love. Best to be in cozy rooms by warm lamplight.
Taste each image in your mouth. Roll it around on your tongue.
Experience it, don't analyse it. Avoid trying to immediately extract its meaning. Let its words overtake you, and the meaning should ooze out over time.
Grace by Wendell Berry
The woods is shining this morning.
Red, gold and green, the leaves
lie on the ground, or fall,
or hang full of light in the air still.
Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes
the place it has been coming to forever.
It has not hastened here, or lagged.
See how surely it has sought itself,
its roots passing lordly through the earth.
See how without confusion it is
all that it is, and how flawless
its grace is. Running or walking, the way
is the same. Be still. Be still.
“He moves your bones, and the way is clear.”
A field in Scurry County by Christian Wiman
Late evening, cool, September, the ground
giving its clays and contours to the sky.
The colors swirl and merge and fall back down
and for a moment, as the reds intensify,
I am a ghost of all I don’t remember,
a grown man standing where a child once stood.
It is late evening. It is cool. September.
Pain like a breeze goes through me as if it could.
In The Space Between Seasons by Lucie Brock-Broido
If I have something important to say
I hope I live here long enough
To say it gracefully. The wind moves
Everything. Nothing is exempt.
In the space between seasons
Which is one night in a life,
The corn beats inside its stalks, waiting for bloom.
The wheat flowers, falls easily.
The clouds become enormous & have names.
Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Autumn by G.K. Chesterton
The woods are bronzed with autumn
When all the leaves are gold
The year grows old around me
And I am passing old
The walls are gilt with mosses
Leaves are a golden sea
The world is fair and ancient
And all is sweet to me.
When I was young and yearning
I chased a drifting dream
I saw a world's ideal
Through mere and tangle gleam
But now the common millions
That trust and toil and grieve
Are flushed in one great sunset
The light I soon must leave.
The young heart, wild and windy
May chase the fresh-blown seed
May seek the lonely blossom
That burns upon the mead.
But stricken hearts grow gentle
And I am passing old
And now I sit in autumn
When all the leaves are gold.
Between Two Fields by Waldo Williams
Clouds: big clouds, pilgrims, refugees,
red with the evening sun of a November storm.
Down where the fields divide, and ash and maple
cluster, the wind’s sound, the sound of the deep,
is an abyss of silence. So who was it stood
there in the middle of this shameless glory, who
stood holding it all? Of every witness witness,
the memory of every memory, the life
of every life? who with a quiet word
calms the red storms of self, till all
the labours of the whole wide world
fold up into this silence.
Harvest Gathering by Phoebe Cary
The last days of the summer: bright and clear
Shines the warm sun down on the quiet land,
Where corn-fields, thick and heavy in the ear,
Are slowly ripening for the laborer’s hand;
Seed-time and harvest — since the bow was set,
Not vainly has man hoped your coming yet!
To the quick rush of sickles, joyously
The reapers in the yellow wheat-fields sung,
And bound the pale sheaves of the ripened rye,
When the first tassels of the maize were hung;
That precious seed into the furrow cast
Earliest in spring-time, crowns the harvest last.
Ever, when summer’s sun burns faint and dim,
And rare and few the pleasant days are given,
When the sweet praise of our thankgiving hymn
Makes beautiful music in the ear of Heaven,
I think of other harvests whence the sound
Of singing comes not as the sheaves are bound.
Read the whole poem here.
Drinking in all the beauties and oddities around me.
Warmly,
Carolyn