Bella Gingell

Immortal Autumn

I speak this poem now with grave and level voice   

In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall. 

I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall   

Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise. 

I praise the fall: it is the human season. 

                                                                  Now 

No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,   

Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,   

Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough, 

But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows   

Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:   

There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn   

Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes. 

Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves   

And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow   

We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know   

The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves. 

It is the human season. On this sterile air 

Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.   

I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone. 

I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.

Archibald MacLeish

Atmospheric, melodramatic - this poem has all the spectral qualities of late Autumn. It amazes me - I mean, here I am, perusing a grouping of black squiggles on a white page - that's all these are, right? And yet a lifetime of Autumns spring up in my mind's eye.I see fields, empty tree branches, bleached grasses with the sky wide and the wind making me pull my coat closer around me. It's all here. I can't get over it. It's magic. And I love those lines "I praise the fall: it is the human season" - isn't that true, the nakedness, the vulnerability, the starkly frail beauty - that's humanity. "Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves/And winter's covering of our hearts with his deep snow/We are alone..." Beautiful. Lonely. Haunting. Like a loon's cry, it stays with you.