(Don’t) wake me up when September ends
Autumn in St Andrews is a museum of sounds and sensations. The leaves in Lade Braes follow every step with a crispy whisper. The rain, which falls on the streets of the town, haunts anyone with somewhere to go, while calming whoever intends to spend the day at home. A light, cold breeze wakes students while they are going to class in the morning, while the occasional tempestuous wind reminds them that it is getting colder and that they should be wearing heavier clothing. Everything about autumn has the potential to inspire poetry. It awakens the melancholic side of humanity. Autumn is a goodbye to sunny, warm days, making way for darkness and goosebumps. In many of my favourite poems, it is used as a metaphor for the passage of time, for sadness, and, at times, even for death. It is the haunting, yet beautiful message that nature sends to humans to remind them that they are not infinite.
The autumnal season served as an inspiration for one of the most famous poems from the Hermetic movement, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s ‘Soldati’ (which means ‘soldiers’ in Italian). The work was composed in 1918, when the poet was fighting in the trenches of Courton. In the poem, the status of soldiers is compared to that of autumnal leaves. Just like leaves which loosely hang on trees, soldiers have precarious lives, which could end at any minute. Those who have not died yet are surrounded by companions who have already collapsed, just like leaves still holding on to trees surrounded by a pavement of dry foliage. While the poem is about the cruel reality of war, one could also think of it as descriptive of life; we are all hanging loosely and precariously. Life is not certain for anyone. Just like dry autumnal leaves, we could be suddenly blown away from the tree that is life by a single gust of wind.
The American poet Amanda Gorman also appealed to the theme of autumn in one of her poems from the collection Call Us What We Carry. Gorman compares the effect of autumn on trees to the effect of COVID-19 on the human population. As stated in the poem, the pandemic made humanity forget happiness, joy, and conviviality, just like autumn makes trees forget the leaves they were once full of. Autumn strips trees of their colour, of their fullness, just as the pandemic snatched away, for a while, the laughter and sense of companionship characteristic of humans.
Pablo Neruda’s ‘Sonnet XXV’ also contains a reference to autumn. The poet describes his existence before he loved the person to whom his work is dedicated. Everything was indifferent, cold, and anonymous. Death reigned sovereign, the world was decadent and decaying. Then, love came along, and a once-dry autumn was filled with beauty and gifts. Once again, autumn is seen as a grey time in which everything is distant, a time which needs the beauty and warmth of love in order to stop being haunting and alienating.
Autumn represents, in all of these poems, nature’s cry. It is the season of nostalgia and melancholy. In Ungaretti’s poem, it is associated with death. According to Gorman, it is an agent of loss. In Neruda’s sonnet, autumn is a state of alienation which can only truly be rendered beautiful by the power of love. While this is understandable, because autumn represents the interruption of sunny days in favour of weeks of icy darkness, there are perspectives from which autumn could be seen as a time of exceptional blessing: for many people, autumn can be a joyful time. As a student, for example, I have always seen autumn as a beginning, rather than an end. Autumn is when classes start, when you see all your friends again, when you set a new routine. It ends the heat of summer but paves the way for a different kind of warmth: it brings back fluffy socks and cosy fireplaces. The world is chaotic and cold, so people move closer to each other in order to resist it. Autumn is a fresh start and a time of love.
Illustration by Grace Robinson
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