There is a particular kind of feeling that arrives with autumn every year: somewhere between excitement and dread as the summer’s ease slowly fades away. Robert Frost, writing in the highly seasonal New England, often adopts an ambivalent approach to the season of autumn. This can certainly be applied to our lives as well; while autumn signals a new term and fresh beginnings, it may also bring feelings of anxiety.
Frost explores this rather poignantly in his poem October. The poem opens with a subtle, yet dramatic vocative — “O hushed October morning mild”— echoing the speaker’s anguish. Nonetheless, Frost far from rejects the sublimity of autumn through the serene soundscape and appreciation of the “gentle mist” and “amethyst” land. This ambivalence shifts towards something darker in his poem After Apple-Picking. Throughout the poem, there is a strong sense of physical exhaustion and incompletion which is aligned to the season of harvest. Frost fixates on the abundance of fruit, yet the speaker is clearly frustrated and not fulfilled by this; this echoes our own modern problem of ambition transforming into a burden. Although that may be a cynical take, I think it signals towards our ability to place too much pressure on ourselves as the gradual shift from summer to autumn occurs. Frost might be all too right to acknowledge that human tendency to overachieve!
Shifting from Frost’s approach towards autumn, I want to examine how Mary Oliver explores it in her poetry. Like Frost, Oliver too views nature as a reflection of the human experience but also as a healing sanctuary for our existence. Her poem Song for Autumn explores the comfort that nature takes in transition: there is a poignant sense of peace and acceptance which reframes the arrival of autumn not as a tragedy but rather an opportunity to reflect and rest. Autumn is certainly a rich and complicated threshold between summer and winter where rapid change occurs.
Read side by side, Frost and Oliver give us a fuller picture of autumn — it would be normal to feel simultaneously anxious and peaceful. Yet, maybe Oliver is right when she signals that we need not dread this change but rather, notice it instead.
Photo by Michael Hamments on Unsplash
