To Autumn

To Autumn, John Keats

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 moss’d 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’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Every year as summer’s long warm days shorten and close in I am determined to embrace Autumn. With its gold and rust hues, gentle mists, dew lined cobwebs and crisp sunny days. It is a visually beautiful season.

New fashions flirt with me from department store windows inviting me to snuggle into soft cashmeres and wrap in toasty wools. Cafes and restaurants light up early and look tantalisingly cosy for long warm chats over coffee or red wine.

But the truth is, for me Autumn always brings a sense of loss. The very real sense of the ending of things.

I mourn the leaves dropping slowly from the increasingly bare trees. I feel the fear for survival as I watch squirrels frantically digging grassy secrets in my garden. The gathering evenings fill me with a sense of gloom. The crisp frosty mornings hint at the slumbering winter months to come. Of the interminable wet days trapped indoors, the steely skies outside. The drawing in. I’m reminded of my own mortality. I think of my inevitable death and the deaths of those I love.

I have to fight my instinct to withdraw, to reflect. I have to fight the rising melancholy and take a philosophical stance. Perhaps it’s necessary for the human condition that the seasons roll as they do through this cycle – new starts, the heights of power, the slowing and closing down, the stillness of the end. Perhaps without the ends we can’t appreciate how precious the beginnings are.

This year Autumn resonates so much more with me because I too am now facing the mellow season of my life. The advancing years, the sense that my powers, my youth, have peaked and that I’m now on the other side of that sunny slope. I am facing a new and unfamiliar horizon. The burdens of years of relationships that have succeeded and those that haven’t, ageing parents, greater responsibilities. These weigh heavily.

But I am a small sum of a huge and magnificent total. This is what the turn of the seasons tell me. Life is greater than me. I shine brightly for the brief warm days that I live. And in my Spring and Summer, oh did I shine!

Bittersweet Autumn. Too tragically beautiful to be savoured. Yet unfolding before me the glories of my meaning, even as I move into my soft-dying days.

#Autumn #Autumnfeeling #JohnKeats