Autumn Musings

Autumn, Fall, whatever you want to call it, it is here!  Pumpkins are on the porch, mums in the yard and the leaves are turning the most beautiful colors. 

I always believed this time of year was sad, second only to winter, because it was the transition to an end.  Now, I see it as a time of bustling activity.  The time of year when you can get things done outside before settling in for a long winter's nap. 

My thoughts are turning to all the events coming up and I have been wondering if this last century or two in human history, when people have begun to look upon the frigid and often extremely difficult season of winter in terms of excitement, should actually be noted as a turning point in our civilization. 

In the middle ages and Renaissance, and really up to the modern age, winter was a time when few survived.  So, all in all, I feel that the literary custom of using fall and winter to denote middle and old age respectively should be determined to be outdated.  Perhaps as much as the characteristics of middle-aged and elderly people are now.  For certain there are octogenarians with more hutzpah than the average 20-something.  Middle-age has become hard to classify as people are living energetic, self-actualized lives in their 40's and 50's and decades beyond that. 

Perhaps it is just that I am in the autumn of my life, and I'm enjoying the season.  So, when I looked for poetic inspiration about autumn, I thought the following, John Keats' "Ode to Autumn" (of which my favorite line is "thou hast thy music too") would be appropriate:

Ode to Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

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;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Work Cited:
Keats, John. Ode to Autumn. The Literature Network. 3 October 2010. Web. [http://www.online-literature.com/donne/480/]