The Garden of the Seasons: Looking at Winter, Shelley Had Big Plans for Spring

   

       It's looking wintry out there. 
          As somebody who makes a big fuss out of fall, I really need to be taking these changes in better stride. Autumn is indeed the 'fall of the year.' 
           Not just leaves. Temperatures are falling. And daylight is diminishing daily, nightly, before our eyes. 
           The world grows quiet. Where are all those crickets and cicadas that made that enchanting 'Change is in the air/ Hurry up!/Hurry up!' music at the close of each fading day, singing us into the softer beauties of the autumn eves?... Well, don't ask. 
          So, with these facts well in possession by anybody with experience of a few go-rounds in a temperate climate, what did we expect to come next? 
          And did I say 'quiet'? Where are the birds? Some are still with us, bearing up with their animal pluck in nature's Hotel Winter, not audibly complaining (more than I can say for us two-legged types).
          Some of the feathered friends that are often still with us this time of year, and checking the place out for daily meals, have apparently made the decision to look elsewhere this year, since we were so late to begin filling the feeder. We filled it for the first time just last Sunday. 
           Score so far: handful of chickadees.
           Such observations on our wintry outlook, abetted by cold and damp each day this week, lead to the state of mind in which (quotes start here) we "We look before and after,
And pine for what is not"

...to borrow a few words from the poet who will supply us with a good deal more shortly.

            As for looking back, this is a fond occupation (I am told) of advancing years. 

           (Laughter off.) 

            Perhaps even more universal is our tendency to look forward to the next desired status. Having "something to look forward to" seems to be a pretty universal desire. My mother used to say of one or another prospective gathering: "it's something to look forward to."

            Even in our happiest best of days, we keep an eye on something fun, desirable, or at least distracting -- coming up. See you, we say to friends or relations, at (or on) such and such.

           And pretty universally in the countries of our climate, when winter is full in the mirror (not yet, of course, in the present case) we look ahead to that something better that goes by the name of spring. 

          Here's the line of poetry that for most of us pretty accurately expresses that common feeling: 

"If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" 

That oft repeated sentiment -- a one-sentence encapsulation of humanity's fundamental need for hope -- comes at the end of the poem, "Ode to the West Wind," written in Italy in 1819, when Percy Bysshe Shelly and his wife, Mary -- famous as the author of "Frankenstein" -- were living in a town near Florence, Italy. 
         The West Wind of the poem's conception is a cleansing autumn wind, taking away the "withered leaves" of the old year and preparing the ground for the birth of a new spring. 
          And in Shelley's poem it's an allegorical wind, driving away a despair that the poet strongly associates with the political decadence and injustice of  his own country, England. He has fled England, where his works have been censured and he is liable to prosecution for "blasphemy" -- by criticizing orthodox Christianity -- and "sedition" in condemning both his country's form of government, a monarchy dominated by the upper class, and particular politicians who serve the ends of the entrenched status quo and are blind to the needs and aspirations of the great mass of the common people.
          His sonnet "England in 1819" bluntly summarizes his view of the English political system at that time:

"Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know

But leechlike to their fainting country cling,

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow"...

          I find a bitter satisfaction in reading these words about another time and place, the England of exactly 200 years ago, and transposing them to our own top rungs of government:
          "rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know"...? 
          Yep, sounds about right to me. 

          The final section of "Ode to the West Wind" best expresses the poet's root notion of a strongly cleansing wind, imploring the West Wind to make use of his own sad thoughts (equated with falling leaves) to achieve "a deep, autumnal tone,/ sweet though in sadness... Be thou me, impetuous one!" 
            And, in the following lines:
            "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
             Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!"

Then in the ode's very last couplet the cleansing wind becomes "the trumpet of a prophecy!" 
          "O Wind," the poem appeals in its famous final line, "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

As I take Shelley's meaning here, Spring -- and all it means: new birth, new season, new growth, flowers, green leaves, crops, food for the whole of earth's population -- doesn't just arrive by itself. 
            We have to clean all the crap out of the way first. The deadness -- physical and moral -- doesn't just disappear by magic. 
             That's why we need the cleansing West Wind. That's what the fresh 'wind' -- a word suggesting spirit, urge, energy, a strong popular movement (or whatever other interpretation we wish to give it) -- does. 
              And that's why this West Wind of Shelley's poetic conception speaks to me so strongly at this particular time in this sorrowful, sickening land of our own, stewing in its corruption, decadence, cruelty and blatant cold-heartedness toward those in need. 
              Also, frankly, it feels good simply to read, and re-read, a poem about hope.

The Garden of the Seasons: "That Time of Year" -- Shakespeare's Sonnet and Our Novembers

This is Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 (posted in full below the photos) known to me and to others by its first few words "That time of year," one of those simple phrases that because of the genius of the poem to which it is connected is now iconic.
          Well, now we are at 'that time of year.'
   


 



       

Here's Shakespeare's Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

      When we discussed this poem in a graduate school course taught by the estimable Helen Vendler, widely regarded as the country's best critical reader of contemporary American poetry (and possibly on everything else written in English as well), she asked us to pin down precisely what time of year the poem was evoking -- pointing out the exactitude with which Shakespeare identifies it:  "When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold."
          We are given three depictions of the state of the autumnal "turn" -- yellow leaves, or  none, or few. And this is in fact the stage of late fall that we all observe. Some trees still hold at least a few of their "autumn" tinted leaves -- yellow, orange-yellow, reddish orange, a few true reds. But there are many fewer than were there a couple of weeks ago. We're at the end of the season that many of us find glorious, the 'crowning' of the year, a spectacular natural show in fortunate realms such as New England and, I suspect, parts of Shakespeare's old England. 
          But now the landscape, our world, feels different. We're cold and walk faster; wear heavier clothes. All the oaks' acorns are on the sidewalk. Neighbors have had their -- I almost said 'rakes' -- but of course what I should say is 'leaf blowers' out. While some lawns are 'raked' clean, patches of sidewalk here and there are mounded high with leaves.
           But they never come down all at once. Some trees are bare. Some trees are still turning. And many are holding on to the poem's a "few" leaves. 
            The exactitude of this portrayal is important because this is a poem not about the height of glory, and not about defeat, death, or the symbolic 'death' of winter's frozen landscape -- but about the transitional, or transitory, period of time when we know all that is coming. Here is a persistent truth about life -- human, and natural: it's always in transition. Always transitory.
            Yet this is the time of a year when we can least well avoid noticing it. It's not 'autumn' any more. It's late autumn; winter's eve. We can't help feeling the change and understanding what it means.  

            So then the poem's speaker makes what now feels like an inevitable comparison between 'that time of year' and himself. 
             He's in the twilight of his maturity. The speaker doesn't, with delicacy, go into details of personal appearances. But we can guess them: He's losing his hair. Flesh sagging. He prefers metaphor to physical description:

"In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west...
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie..."

Twilight is of course beautiful, but you know it's not going to last that long. So, the poems appears to be saying, you may still like what you're seeing, but you know it's not going to last. It's like the late glow of an expiring fire. If you've made any fires in a fireplace you know this is what you see. And, as the poem shows through this comparison, our own span of existence is "Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by." 
        We die, in the end, from living. We are the fire.    
       And still, as we read in the poem's great coda -- those final two lines -- "which thou" (a stand-in, I believe, meant to apply to all of us human creatures) 
"...perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long."
          Actually, I feel that same way about "that time of year" -- November. I hate the coming cold and the steady loss of daylight, but I love the world's fading beauty and those profound, nostalgic November twilights.             

         I can't remember what more there was to analyze, explicate, or even talk much about in this short masterpiece, except that every word is perfect.
         ...Except, on second thought, one interesting historical note: In line 4, the poem compares the leafless branches of the late autumn trees to "the bare ruin'd choirs." 
          Unlike today's understanding of the word "choir," the choirs the poem is speaking of refer to the spaces within churches -- a place, not the people -- where the church's picked singers (today's 'choir') would sit or stand ready to sing the psalms or chants or other musical passages that we now call "hymns" -- in Latin. Everything done in church was in Latin when England's churches were built with places for the choirs often high above and behind the altar -- to sing the church's beautiful music, until the Protestant Reformation came along, modestly in some respects under the aegis of King Henry VIII's establishment of the Church of England. Henry's plan was for an English Catholic church. The king would rule it; would own the property; would "dissolve" the monasteries at will if he wanted to take possession of their land and other wealth.
           The militant Protestants, who later became the Puritans, took things much further. They banned the Latin, the choirs, and they removed all the music until in the time of Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare's England held hundreds of old churches where the places for the "choir" singers -- had been pulled down, ruined. 
           Happily, however, nothing has ruined those leafless trunks and branches, symbolized as "bare ruin'd choirs" by Shakespeare, in the woodlands and shade trees in our lovely late autumn world -- ...yet. 

Garden of the Seasons: At Home With November

The November Sublime. The tender November light, autumn's second self. 
          Every season has its characteristic, signature state of mind, emotion, nostalgia, and no doubt regret. Its time-borne expectations. It can be cold, this final month of fall (according to the meteorologists' calculation, if not the astronomers'), but it hasn't been cold yet this year. The season lingers. It's late phase fall. Today's newspaper ran a wonderful panorama photo taken from some elevation high enough to catch a strip of fabulous tree-line through the heart of Boston called the Emerald Necklace.        Wonderful, I thought. That's the news. I have a friend who says "for every hour you spend reading or watching the news, spend two hours looking at trees." Sometimes he says "ten hours." This year is shaping up as one of those ten-hour times. 
         Anne and I logged some happy hours last week walking with trees through some of our favorite Eastern Massachusetts haunts, paying two visits, from separate starting points to the Blue Hills Reservation, a state park that is one of the great treasures of the Greater Boston region. 
          You can hear the traffic when you begin the dirt path into the forest -- (shown in the second and third photos down) and then, in a matter of few minutes, you can't hear it any longer. Our 'real world' is out there in the traffic. The planet's 'real world' is in here, among the trees. Its soundtrack is subtle. Silence, or almost silence, at times. The occasional bird this time of year. Something of an insect sound; a last cricket somewhere? (Nobody tell him it's all over.) It's squirrel time, of course, but less obviously in wild places than in our neighborhoods, where competition breeds chatter. In the woods, there are plenty of trees for everyone. Trees don't speak much, unless the wind is up.     

That the wind has spoken this season, considerably on occasions, is clear. We see evidence of that on the news, and see the footage of trees that came down to cut power or, sadly, cleave roofs. We see the signs in the Blue Hills forests as well, where occasionally a great old trunk, or simply a once-strong branching has crossed the path. If the fall is recent, and of significant weight, it's likely that no one has cleared it, and so we make our own paths around these blockages, no great nimbleness required. The photographic footage of trees falling on our houses or power lines may give the impression that nature is a destructive force. Unfortunately, many of our neighbors appear to think this way. They want trees around their houses cut down. They search the city's street trees for signs of age, weakness, disease; an excuse for removal. It's like pulling your teeth out to prevent cavities. 
          But trees, and great nature itself, are not a destructive force, but a creative force. We wouldn't be here without them. Trees created our world; they made the atmosphere breathable for the 'higher' (or more complex) animals, such as ourselves. They take carbon dioxide out the air and return oxygen to it. Their roots force seams through the rock, helping to make earth. Without plants and the microscopic allies turning rock into soil for a billion years, we wouldn't be able to grow food. We would have only the ocean to feed us, and how soon would we eat all the fish? (Oh, yeah, we're all ready doing that.) 
            And they beautify the face of the planet. Most of the other photos on this page came from the face of November as it appeared in the Arnold Arboretum in Boston on Sunday, the first day of the return to standard time. The arboretum is a living laboratory for the Harvard University forestry school, and an amazingly curated collection of world-class trees.
Spending time among the trees -- whatever the apparent motivation: exercise, fresh air, aesthetic appreciation -- helps us understand their story. 
            Yes, the trees are talking to us. It costs absolutely nothing to listen.  

Anne is seen is this photo examining a plant which I've certainly never seen anywhere else, called, fittingly enough "Purple Berry Bush." The tag says it's from Korea. It also bears of course a Latin botanical name, but I didn't recognize any of those terms.

We were looking for Larch trees on our visit to the arboretum, having learned from previous visits that the Larch is a member of the conifer family whose leaves turn orange in the fall and then fall off, like deciduous trees. That is, it's an "evergreen" whose leaves are not 'evergreen.' You can glimpse one in the middle distance of this photo.