October

Rick Stevens

October

The green elm with the one great bough of gold

Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, --

The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,

Harebell and scabious and tormentil,

That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,

Bow down to; and the wind travels too light

To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;

The gossamers wander at their own will.

At heavier steps than birds' the squirrels scold.

The rich scene has grown fresh again and new

As Spring and to the touch is not more cool

Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might

As happy be as earth is beautiful,

Were I some other or with earth could turn

In alternation of violet and rose,

Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,

And gorse that has no time not to be gay.

But if this be not happiness, -- who knows?

Some day I shall think this a happy day,

And this mood by the name of melancholy

Shall no more blackened and obscured be.

Edward Thomas

I wonder how long the image of the elm tree waited in Edward's mind until it finally broke out in poetry. How many moments stay with us and we have no idea why? And do these images/moments/scenes silently germinate within us over time?

“Some day I shall think this a happy day,

And this mood by the name of melancholy,

Shall no more blackened and obscured be.”

Those lines impress me. The speaker is melancholy, he doesn’t say why, and I like that too – (how often do we understand exactly why a feeling overtakes us?) but there is also this green elm with one great bough of gold. It’s enough to give him hope that he will feel different one day, better – perhaps even happy. 


 

The Signpost

Annie Soudain

The Signpost

The dim sea glints chill.  The white sun is shy,
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hilltop by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller's-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.

I read the sign.  Which way shall I go?
A voice says:  You would not have doubted so
At twenty.  Another voice gentle with scorn
Says:  At twenty you wished you had never been born.

One hazel lost a leaf of gold
From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told
The other he wished to know what 'twould be
To be sixty by this same post.  'You shall see,'
He laughed -- and I had to join his laughter --
'You shall see; but either before or after,
Whatever happens, it must befall,
A mouthful of earth to remedy all
Regrets and wishes shall freely be given;
And if there be a flaw in that heaven
'Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be
To be here or anywhere talking to me,
No matter what the weather, on earth,
At any age between death and birth, --
To see what day or night can be,
The sun and the frost, the land and the sea,
Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring, --
With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,
Standing upright out in the air
Wondering where he shall journey, O where?'

Edward Thomas

A little back story about this poem. Edward Thomas and Robert Frost were friends. They would walk and talk. Thomas had critiqued Frost's poetry and brought him more recognition, Frost had read Thomas's writing about nature and encouraged him to try turning that into poetry. They saw a lot of things in the same way. In their walks, Frost discovered his friends' struggle with indecision, and remarked, "No matter which road you take, you'll always sigh, and wish you'd taken another." Which might remind you of Frosts' "The Road Not Taken"? Anyway, this is Thomas's take on the difficulty of making choices. The first stanza is my favorite of all of them. What a genius he was at describing nature! And that question, "Which way shall I go?"  - we aren't human if we aren't wrestling with that one.



 

Lights Out

Helene Schjerfbeck

Lights Out

I have come to the borders of sleep,

The unfathomable deep

Forest where all must lose

Their way, however straight,

Or winding, soon or late;

They cannot choose.

 

Many a road and track

That, since the dawn’s first crack,

Up to the forest brink,

Deceived the travellers,

Suddenly now blurs,

And in they sink.

 

Here love ends,

Despair, ambition ends;

All pleasure and all trouble,

Although most sweet or bitter,

Here ends in sleep that is sweeter

Than tasks most noble.

 

There is not any book

Or face of dearest look

That I would not turn from now

To go into the unknown

I must enter, and leave, alone,

I know not how.

 

The tall forest towers;

Its cloudy foliage lowers

Ahead, shelf above shelf;

Its silence I hear and obey

That I may lose my way

And myself.

Edward Thomas 

 

"There is not any book/Or face of dearest look/That I would not turn from now..." That line jumps out at me. It's true, there comes a point where we all do this, no matter how much we don't want to. How strange. How very strange sleep is, when you think about it. This poem reminds us of that. Every night we go on a journey and lose ourselves. I love how this poem with it's short lines and tight rhymes emphasizes the rhythmic inevitability of sleep. I read an African folk tale once, about a boy who goes hunting for sleep, and how his family warns him that sleep will creep up and catch him before he knows what is happening. Interesting, that idea of Sleep as a predator and we its prey.

 

  

The Haymakers

Myles Birket Foster

Haymaking

After night’s thunder far away had rolled

The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,

And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,

Like the first gods before they made the world

And misery, swimming the stormless sea

In beauty and in divine gaiety.

The smooth white empty road was lightly strewn

With leaves—the holly’s Autumn falls in June—

And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat.

The mill-foot water tumbled white and lit

With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd

Of children pouring out of school aloud.

And in the little thickets where a sleeper

For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper

And garden warbler sang unceasingly;

While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee

The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow

As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.

Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown

Travelled the road. In the field sloping down,

Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,

Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook

Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood

Without its team, it seemed it never would

Move from the shadow of that single yew.

The team, as still, until their task was due,

Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade

That three squat oaks mid-field together made

Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut,

And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, but

Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean.

The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,

But still. And all were silent. All was old,

This morning time, with a great age untold,

Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,

Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,

A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.

Under the heavens that know not what years be

The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements

Uttered even what they will in times far hence—

All of us gone out of the reach of change—

Immortal in a picture of an old grange.

Edward Thomas

 I love the little details: the clouds, the empty road, the water going over the mill-wheel, the birds, the scent of hay. And that moment of stillness. "The men lean on their rakes." That moment where the details become bigger than themselves. "All of us gone out of the reach of change..." Interesting. Here is the moment where time melts into eternity, and we find ourselves "under the heavens that know not what years be."