October 22, 2021
Suddenly, it is October. How is that possible? Summer is always gone too soon for me. But here we are in the week of the birthday, on October 27, of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died in 1953 at the age of 39. I had no use for poetry until I came across, at the age of 16, the first two stanzas of Thomas’s most famous poem, “Fern Hill,” as well as the short and unforgettable “In my craft or sullen art.” I memorized those passages accidentally simply by rereading them so often. When I was 18, Thomas’s Collected Poems, was the first volume of poetry I ever bought, and I went on later to write my doctoral dissertation on Thomas’s poetry.
Over the course of his career, Thomas wrote four poems celebrating his birthday, two of which are among his greatest, “Poem in October” and “Poem on His Birthday.” They are not just personal but also seasonal, autumnal. Seasons are moods, and moods are perspectives of the imagination, ways of seeing that revolve over the course of the year. They are not universal but depend on where you live, and the famous seasonal poetry (and music: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons) of the ordinary literary canon derives from the seasons of Europe and the eastern half of the United States. Within that context, we can ask, what is the autumnal mood, the autumnal perspective and attitude?
I warn you, I have my prejudices. I am a spring person, born March 31 in the season of rebirth and new beginnings, and have always been glad of it. I do not possess one single characteristic of my astrological sign but am content to be an Aries because in the old days Aries marked the beginning of the year and was said to be the house that the sun was in at the moment of the Creation. I am baffled by the people, and there are many of them, who say that fall is their favorite season. In fall, it grows colder and the days grow shorter; the small animals are disappearing into hibernation and everything else is dying. It is the season of mortality and leads to the festival of the dead and the undead: to Halloween and All Souls Day. In Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism it is associated with the narrative pattern of tragedy, which seems to derive from the mythical narrative of the dying god figure, the sacrificed embodiment of natural fertility studied exhaustively in Sir James Frazer’s famous The Golden Bough. We speak of being in the autumn of our years, and the writers of the fin de siècle period when the poet Yeats was young spoke of their world-weary mood as the “autumn of the body.”
“Oh, but the leaves are so beautiful,” is the usual reply.
But, my (good-natured) sarcasm notwithstanding, a perspective of the imagination cannot simply be rejected: it is part of a total picture. We may cast out, or decreate, to use my vocabulary, false versions of the autumnal perspective, but the reality of autumn is permanent. So we must try to gain a sense of the reality that abides beneath the relatively superficial level of temperamental preferences. We may, to foreshadow, arrive eventually at an intuition of a mysterious relationship of the vernal and the autumnal, at a sense of their paradoxical identity, yin-yang fashion.
All imagery, and thus all moods, have both ideal and ironic aspects. Which is “true”? Once again, the imagination doesn’t work like that. As Blake said, “Anything possible to believe is an image of truth.” Those who want the certainty of a single, univocal truth attain it by privileging (to use academic lingo) a certain perspective and denigrating or suppressing the inevitable alternatives, thus turning an imaginative perspective into an ideology or belief system, which is also a power structure. But the suppressed perspectives remain, haunting the approved belief system like ghosts, an appropriate Halloween image. The task of criticism is to recover the full range of imaginative perspectives, which are not random but part of a total picture.
The most famous portrait of ideal autumn is Keats’s great ode “To Autumn” (1820). “Portrait” is an appropriate term, for autumn is personified and directly addressed. She is a nature goddess, specifically a goddess of the harvest season, shown “sitting careless on a granary floor” and “by a cyder press.” The imagery of ideal autumn is that of harvest and vintage, specifically bread and wine. These images are of course spiritualized in the Bible, not just in the Eucharist but in the apocalypse, in which the human race is harvested like wheat and trodden like grapes: the image in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” of the Lord trampling the “grapes of wrath” is taken from the Book of Isaiah. But Keats in all his poetry rejects transcendent religion. All we have is this world and this life, and we must seek our fulfillment in it—even if we die, as Keats did, at the age of 25, two years after writing this poem.
The symbolism of harvest and vintage is of fulfilment, of gathering in the results of our labors over the course of the year, feeling satisfied and thankful for what we have been able, and allowed by good fortune, to accomplish. In the United States, some of this feeling has been displaced onto Thanksgiving, despite all the ideological and commercial corruptions. In the final stanza, Keats counterpoises autumn against spring: “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they? / Think not of them thou hast thy music too.” Evening is deepening, and visual images give way to sounds in the falling darkness, but the tone is calm and acceptant, not elegiac. To those who create, the theme of accomplishing your work before the night comes in which no one can labor is particularly poignant, but it is relevant to everyone: every life is a creative task, and we leave behind the fruits of our labor, even when they are invisible.
Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October,” celebrating his “thirtieth year to heaven,” is a more complex treatment of ideal autumn, as the poet climbs a hill, on whose height he has an epiphany not only of spring and summer but of paradise momentarily regained, a paradise identified with the innocence of childhood. He stands “in the summer noon / Though the town below lay leaved with October blood,” and he listens “To the rain wringing / Wind blow cold / In the wood faraway under me.” Both Dante and Milton put paradise on the top of a high mountain, and the speaker has momentarily climbed to a higher state of being, a “peak experience,” as the psychologist Abraham Maslow would call it,” in which “all the gardens / Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales / Beyond the border.” For a moment, time and space are transcended and he becomes his childhood self, walking with his mother: “his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.” The experience is temporary, signaled by the repeated phrase “the weather turned round.” Yet it is always potentially repeatable, and the speaker prays that his “heart’s truth / Still be sung / On this high hill in a year’s turning.” We have not lost paradise, with its spring and summer symbolism. It is latent in the midst of a fallen and falling world. We do not recover it literally: on the literal level, all the paradisal gardens are “tall tales.” The question is whether there is a different kind of reality signified by those tales, or merely wish-fulfilment.
The darker side of autumn begins as a somber, melancholy mood, not that of the days when the leaves of the trees blaze in sunlight with colors so brilliant they seem to manifest something beyond mere nature, but rather of the days of rain and melancholy and darkness come early. When Ray Bradbury published a revised version of his first book, he called it The October Country (1955) and appended to it this epigraph:
October country…that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain….
What are autumn thoughts? A good number of them are about death. In “October Song” by Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band, the singer strives to emulate “The falling leaves that jewel the ground, / They know the art of dying, / And leave with joy their glad gold hearts / In the scarlet shadows lying.” But such acceptance does not come naturally, to use the correct pun, for human beings. In the last stanza, the singer says,
Sometimes I want to murder time,
Sometimes when my heart’s aching,
But mostly I just stroll along
The path that he is taking.
But the autumnal mood may darken far past the somber and melancholic. In “The Auroras of Autumn” (1948) by the American poet Wallace Stevens, it darkens to near terror, not just of death but of the annihilation of all things in time. It is a long poem (240 lines, ten cantos of 24 lines), and a very difficult one: I have not encountered a fully adequate commentary on it. It is a great poem nonetheless. The speaker, who can be identified with the poet to a degree unusual for the usually impersonal Stevens, ponders the northern lights, visible in the autumn skies of Stevens’ native Connecticut. He imagines them as the rippling body of a serpent—a body which is yet not a body, for the serpent represents a realm above the phenomenal world of bodies and forms: “This is form gulping after formlessness, / Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances, / And the serpent body flashing without the skin.”
The serpent dwells in a transcendent realm beyond time and the transience of all things in time. It is a form of the imagination, because all things are, but in a troubled moment the poet wonders whether it is not a sublime and inhuman image of divinity, as if the Leviathan that God showed to Job were actually an epiphany of the shadow side of God:
Is there an imagination that sits enthroned
As grim as it is benevolent, the just
And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops
To imagine winter? When the leaves are dead,
Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself,
Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting
In highest night?
There is no real answer because the serpent is the symbol of the transcendent mystery above and beyond our knowledge. What the poet does know is this world, to which he says farewell, repeating the phrase “Farewell to an idea” several times. By “idea” Stevens does not mean a concept, but rather something closer to Plato’s Ideas, the forms that create reality, except that Stevens’ ideas are forms of the imagination rather than of the reason. Our reality is an idea, an imaginative construct, and unlike Platonic forms imaginative ideas wear out. The poem imagines the casting off of the idea that is the life Stevens has lived, for, unlike the poems of Keats and Thomas, who died young, this is a poem written in old age.
In the second canto, the poet walks along a beach where everything is white, a white cabin, white flowers. White here is the color of decreation, of the reduction of exhausted experience down to the level of colorlessness, of zero, of the mood of winter, of nothing, as in Stevens’ famous poem “The Snow Man.” Hanging over the whiteness is the north, “With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps / And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green, / The color of ice and fire and solitude.”
The poem goes on to say farewell to parental archetypes, the warm and sheltering mother, the patriarchal father. These parents compose a home, into which the father invites musicians and guests and, with dream logic, the home becomes a theatre: “The father fetches pageants out of the air, / Scenes of the theatre.” And then the theatre itself is dismissed, and in a tremendous passage the poet confronts what is left:
He opens the door of his house
On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.
Nevertheless, in its last three cantos, the poem makes a turn, declaring “There may be always a time of innocence. / There is never a place,” going on to explain of this innocence that “It is not a thing of time, nor of place, / Existing in the idea of it, alone,” and yet for all that “it is not / Less real.” In another great poem, Stevens calls this other reality “description without place.” It is not ordinary reality, nor is it supernatural, “But it exists, / It exists, it is visible, it is, it is.” And “we partake thereof, / Lie down like children in this holiness.” The experience of this other mode of being is not salvation: we remain “An unhappy people in a happy world.” What the poet may know, in the poem’s last lines, is not “hushful paradise” but, “by these lights / Like a blaze of summer straw in winter’s nick.” The northern lights have become transvalued, becoming a blaze that reminds of summer in the midst of winter.
Critics have sometimes treated “The Auroras of Autumn” as a dialogue with Keats, whose attitude that this world is all we have of paradise was a profound influence on Stevens, as we can see in his earlier poem “Sunday Morning.” But to me it is clear that a more immediate influence is Shakespeare. In Act 4 of The Tempest, Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre in late middle age, the magician Prospero summons up a wedding masque to celebrate the engagement of his daughter to prince Ferdinand. The goddess Ceres, comparable to Keats’ harvest deity, sings a song wishing for the couple that “Spring come to you at the farthest / In the very end of harvest.” To which an enraptured Ferdinand exclaims, “Let me live here forever! / So rare a wondered father and a wife / Makes this place Paradise.” Prospero thereupon makes the pageant vanish and launches into his famous speech saying that all the world will vanish like this pageant and “Leave not a wrack behind. We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” I read “The Auroras of Autumn” as an attempt to reply to Shakespeare about what may abide when all else vanishes. That something is the imagination itself understood not as a Christian or Platonic realm apart from this world, but the imagination as the home of human life here and now. It is not just a consoling subjective fantasy but a reality of a different order than that of the subject-object world. The Productions of Time is about exactly that.
“Poem on His Birthday,” the last of Dylan Thomas’s birthday sequence, depicts the poet on his thirty-fifth birthday looking out from the famous boat house on the coast of rural Wales where he wrote most of his later poems, seeing the beautiful natural world under the aspect of death: “Herons walk in their shroud.” Yet he counts his blessing aloud: “Four elements and five / Senses, and man a spirit in love…And this last blessing most,” that the closer he moves towards death, “the whole world then / …Spins its morning of praise.” This seems close to Stevens’ affirmation of the reality of “innocence,” but with one apparent difference. For Thomas, the reality beyond mutability is the presence of “fabulous, dear God”:
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for his joy.
Heaven and God never were, nor will be ever, but are always true. At least occasionally something similar breaks through Stevens’ resolutely non-religious stance, as in a poem called “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”:
“We say God and the imagination are one. / How high that highest candle lights the dark.” Such a God imagines spring’s rebirth and autumn’s dying and refuses to choose, because he knows there is something that transcends them both, though only by including them both.