![]() Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Perhaps fearful that he had underemphasized the grim ending of his poem, Bryant made another foray into the poetry of autumn that brooks no suggestion of enchantment or moral ambivalence about the season: The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, The final stanzas lament the “low strife” of everyday existence, which “makes men mad.” His footsteps through the woods will shortly and inevitably lead to such an unhappy place, but for the moment he remains in a golden world. ![]() The upland, where the mingled splendours glow,īy the end of the poem, autumn emerges as a fleeting refuge. Seem groups of giant kings, in purple and gold, In their wide sweep, the coloured landscape round, The fantastic appears to us within nature’s crepuscular beauty: The mountains that infold, The turning leaves give to the land another sort of significance, which Bryant describes as a kind of enchantment. The “summer tresses of the trees are gone,” he writes. William Cullen Bryant’s “Autumn Woods” is a subtle and skillful instance of this vision. Out of such a Calvinist apprehension emerged the New England literary tradition. Were those fall colors but pleasing illustrations of God’s providence or signs that the devil lurked in those woods and that the strange new land presented not only bodily but spiritual dangers? They viewed the season’s turning as rich in mystery it was not, however, the sensuous but the spiritual significance behind the color of the leaves that caught their attention. What was this wild and dangerous place, they wondered. When our pilgrim ancestors first encountered the blazing autumn beauty of New England, they did not take it calmly. The flashy fire of the autumnal landscape and its sudden snuffing out both remind us that God’s book of nature often speaks in unmistakable but mysterious characters even the most insensible among us cannot miss the meaning unfolding before the eye and discernible to the nose, and yet that meaning is not univocal or simple. Autumn as a season, for example, is evocative of many things: the darkness of decay, to be sure, alongside bold beauty. Just seeing their names induces in me fearĪt hand than those that haunt the children’s dreams.īoth natural and artificial things bear a parabolic or symbolic quality to them. With signs for candidates I’ve long disliked. That turn is also more directly figured in the appearance of political yard signs in advance of November 2016: A few doors farther on, the lawn is spiked Nature and artifice alike speak the language of the end of things. ” Although the brilliant and changing colors of the leaves begin the poem, the explicit subject is the fearful turn of season and history, symbolized above all by the neighbors’ Halloween decorations. A number of years ago, I published a poem in First Things called “ Autumn Road.
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