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| Autumn Flowers |
Autumn in essence is the climax and culmination of the year
providing the crowning glory to what has come before. The sadness and elegiac
tone is not to be overdone; the colours, the textures the aromas and the sheer
vitality of autumn are beyond compare. English Autumn and American Fall are
celebratory firework displays making us happy to be alive and allowing us a
rest before a New Year calls us for new effort and fresh challenges. John Donne
struck the right note:
No Spring nor Summer
beauty hath such grace
As I have seen on one
autumnal face.
We celebrate this delightful time in all sorts of ways, in
poetry, in music, in painting and by simple observation of the natural world
about us. Keats’ Ode to Autumn is
apparently the most anthologised of all poems but surely its high diction
cannot be condemned as hackneyed:
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-eaves 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.
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves 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.
I am old-fashioned enough to prefer the clear recitation by
that great actor Robert Donat, who recorded many of Keats’ works, and whose
classic tones fit the piece exactly.
The glorious foliage of New England in The Fall is one of
the great sights of the US, refreshing, inspiring and humbling.
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| The Beauty of New England, USA |
The great event of Autumn is the harvest, that joyous
culmination of hard farming work and Nature’s fecundity. Nowadays the event is
taken for granted, mechanisation sparing much of the sweat, and we look back
nostalgically to earlier times:
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| The Harvesters by Pieter Breughel the Elder (1565) |
Harvest was a time for celebration, for Hallowe’en parties, for church Harvest Festivals for Thanksgiving, making autumn a happy few months.
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| Harvest Time by John Atkinson (1910s) |
Autumn is of course honoured in the charming Baroque chamber music of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, composed in Venice in 1723. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z21_VpNipfg
Popular music enjoyed The
Autumn Leaves, originally a French song, made famous in English by the
incomparable voice of Nat “King” Cole in 1950. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEMCeymW1Ow
Heady autumn eventually gently passes. How much we loved
walking in wellies through a carpet of fallen leaves, smelling damp earth and
incipient woodland decay. As autumn draws to an end we soon participate in the
solemnity of Remembrance. In England the highlight is the wreath-laying and
march-past at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. This year the Queen, though present,
will delegate her wreath-laying duties to Prince Charles, a reminder that she
is in her autumn years. The grey-coated Guards will line the ceremonial routes
and the massed bands will play their utterly poignant and patriotic music,
including a military version of Purcell’s Dido’s
Lament.
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| The massed bands at The Cenotaph |
Autumn’s disappearance is gradual, weather dependent but inevitable. Do not despair, this golden season will be back next year in all her glory.
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| Late-flowering blue-purple Asters |
SMD
5.11.17
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2017
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