The Music of October
April is officially “Poetry Month.” But for my part, I think it ought to be October.
I think April is Poetry Month mainly because poets – many of whom are old guys like me – really like to identify with cold arthritic tree limbs turning green again. T S Eliot, who I think was born old, poked not a little fun at this identification with his opening lines in “The Wasteland”:
April is the cruellest month, breeding,
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
But October is a time of remembrance and fullness. And poetry, after all, is all about remembrance and the fullness of meaning. The blueness of the sky is paler now than the azure summer: every cloud is a sign. Every leaf is a photograph in an album of memory. The boughs of oaks and maples, loblolly and longleaf pines, whisper echoes of far-off waterfalls and ocean shores.
The October time of life is taken up by the poetic business of setting memory to rights.
After that longish introduction, here is the poet laureate of October, the twenty-three-year-old John Keats in 1819:
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue …
These are a few lines from the third stanza of his “Ode to Autumn.” In the poem, Summer has accomplished her hard work of “conspiring with the sun” and “bending the cottage-trees” with fruit, of “filling fruit with ripeness to the core” and “swelling the gourd,” of “o’erbrimming” the hives with sweet honey.
Now it’s Autumn and time for storing up the golden things. Now it’s time for thanksgiving and festivals. Now it’s the “soft-dying day.”
The color of October, Keats suggests, touches “the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”
The harvest is done now. The work of Summer is stored up, like tomatoes canned, peanuts roasted, crabapples jellied (thank you Susan), and apples squeezed slowly in the cider press.
Summer bends toward the business of October. One cannot get away from it, this Autumnal gaze. “Old men ought to be explorers,” Eliot wrote in “The Four Quartets.” The gift of maturity is that everything in the present can be framed and deepened and interpreted by remembrance.
We’ve learned, by now, in the October season, not to be governed by hard ideals. A lot of life is missed by being doctrinaire, driven by ironclad preconceived notions.
We find out, in the Fall, that it’s so exhausting to be an idealogue. It’s better, a far far better thing, to walk in the trees humbly, open-minded, and to listen to the wind as God intended.
We see, in the Fall, the mysterious hand of Providence. We see the face of God in our sister and brother. We see that the Father of lights in Whom there is no shadow of turning only gives good things, that while He never sends bad things He redeems all things, that God’s will is only a good will … that this was, and is, a good earth, a good life.
It took us a long time to figure that out.
It took until October.
By 1819, Keats was becoming a great poet. He was moving from a philosophical outlook to something he called a “negative capability” —a quality of imaginative open-mindedness in which “a sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
Out of this sense of beauty came Keats’ “Ode to Autumn.”
But in 1819, John Keats had already entered into his own October. He would die only three years later in Rome – in 1819, tuberculine bacteria had advanced far into his lungs.
Still, he would have agreed with his fellow laureate. T S Eliot continued his lines in “East Coker”:
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion.
Which puts a deeper, sweeter, more poignant frame around this glowing line:
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.
Comments