I came down this morning, and, in a daze from Dearieme‘s and Bruessel‘s exposure of the shocking seasonal chocolate scam, I found that during the night the previous post (on the autumn leaves) had elicited some delightful seasonal poems.
Thanks to Jamessal we have Richard Wilbur‘s wonderfully (for me) evocative “In the Elegy Season”:
Haze, char, and the weather of All Souls’:
A giant absence mopes upon the trees:
Leaves cast in casual potpourris
Whisper their scents from pits and cellar-holes.Or brewed in gulleys, steeped in wells, they spend
In chilly steam their last aromas, yield
From shallow hells a revenance of field
And orchard air. And now the envious mindWhich could not hold the summer in my head
While bounded by that blazing circumstance
Parades these barrens in a golden trance,
Remembering the wealthy season dead,And by an autumn inspiration makes
A summer all its own. Green boughs arise
Through all the boundless backward of the eyes,
And the soul bathes in warm conceptual lakes.Less proud than this, my body leans an ear
Past cold and colder weather after wings’
Soft commotion, the sudden race of springs,
The goddess’ tread heard on the dayward stair,Longs for the brush of the freighted air, for smells
Of grass and cordial lilac, for the sight
Of green leaves building into the light
And azure water hoisting out of wells.
Principal gave us this, Rilke’s “Herbsttag”:
Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.Befiel den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
Some translations are here, but since Stu didn’t like them and I’m pressed for time, I won’t include any.
So this post is dedicated to finding more great poems of autumn/fall and –because half our readers are located in either the southern hemisphere or the tropics — poems about spring, torrential rainfall or whatever season you consider to be seasonal.
Poems in Hungarian, Creole or Spanish, or indeed anything other than English, get extra points…
As always, there will be no retribution if nothing shows up.
A Bad Guide 
Well, there’s this by Keats. I thought of its first line when I saw one of your misty pictures the other day. Confession: I thought of the first line, but had no clue as to how it went on or whose it was; my knowledge of it came by way of Jeeves, who quoted just that one line to Bertie one morning.
this
Beautiful poems, and very fitting to what I see now from my window. Rilke’s Herbsttag is just as popular with Hungarian translators as the Wanderers Nachtlied by Goethe, so here is a large collection of its Hungarian translations by the best poets of the 20th century.
As to original Hungarian poems about autumn, one immediately recalls the “End of September” (1847) by Sándor Petőfi which is traditionally regarded as one of the most beautiful – at least most musical – poems of Hungarian Romanticism. I quoted it from here where you can also find its translations to some other languages. What you, however, cannot find there, is perhaps its most beautiful translation, done by Boris Pasternak into Russian, of which I have a printed version, but would be grateful for an audio version as well. To enjoy the music of the Hungarian text, here is a traditional sung version, and here a less traditional and… er… less Romantic one.
Szeptember végén
Még nyílnak a völgyben a kerti virágok,
Még zöldel a nyárfa az ablak előtt,
De látod amottan a téli világot?
Már hó takará el a bérci tetőt.
Még ifju szivemben a lángsugarú nyár
S még benne virít az egész kikelet,
De íme sötét hajam őszbe vegyűl már,
A tél dere már megüté fejemet.
Elhull a virág, eliramlik az élet…
Űlj, hitvesem, űlj az ölembe ide!
Ki most fejedet kebelemre tevéd le,
Holnap nem omolsz-e sirom fölibe?
Oh mondd: ha előbb halok el, tetemimre
Könnyezve borítasz-e szemfödelet?
S rábírhat-e majdan egy ifju szerelme,
Hogy elhagyod érte az én nevemet?
Ha eldobod egykor az özvegyi fátyolt,
Fejfámra sötét lobogóul akaszd,
Én feljövök érte a síri világból
Az éj közepén, s oda leviszem azt,
Letörleni véle könyűimet érted,
Ki könnyeden elfeledéd hivedet,
S e szív sebeit bekötözni, ki téged
Még akkor is, ott is, örökre szeret!
1847
End of September
Below in the valley the flowers are resplendent,
Outside by the window the poplars still glow,
But see where the winter, already ascendant,
Has covered the far distant hilltops with snow.
My heart is still bathed in the fierce sun of passion,
All spring is in bloom there, by spring breezes tossed,
But look how my hair turns hoary and ashen,
Its raven black touched by the premature frost.
The petals are falling and life is declining.
Come sit in my lap, my beloved, my own!
You, with your head, in my bosom repining,
Tomorrow perhaps will you mourn me alone?
Tell me the truth: should I die, will your sorrow
Extend to the day when new lovers prepare
Your heart for forsaking, insisting you borrow
Their name, and abandon the one we now share?
If once you should cast off the black veil of mourning,
Let it stream like a flag from the cross where I lie,
And I will arise from the place of sojourning
To claim it and take it where life is put by,
Employing it there to dry traces of weeping
For a lover who could so lightly forget,
And bind up the wounds in the heart in your keeping
Which loved you before and will worship you yet.
trans. Szirtes, George
I forgot to say that anyone who gets their poem by way of P.G. Wodehouse gets a starred double-point.
And here is the Modern Greek autumn poem I love the most, by Kostas Karyotakis, set to music by Photis Ionatos, with my own translation into English.
Ok, here’s a Norwegian song, a 1993 poem by the Haugesund poet Kolbein Falkeid made into a breakthrough hit the same year by the local folk/rock group Vamp.
The interested may enjoy the local dialect, or rather the mix of traditional dialect features and standard Bokmål words that is the current colloquial.
(I probably should translate it, but unlike some others I don’t just shake that sort of thing out of my sleeve.)
Hey, I got paragraph breaks in LH’s preview.
(*sob*) Uf, I can’t think of any!
If I had something to do with Literature I would feel terribly idiot, dumb and guilty! Oh, wait a minute… (*sob*)
Well, real and actual wonderful weather is waiting for me now; perhaps while I’m sunbathing and swimming I can think of a way of not look so bad.
And I was so preoccupied with getting the format right that I failed to notice that I linked to Norwegian Wikipedia instead of English.
This one by Theodor Storm, another autumn-of-life poem, but a quiet, puzzled Nordic one (he was from Husum):
Ans Haff nun fliegt die Möwe,
Und Dämmerung bricht herein;
Über die feuchten Watten
Spiegelt der Abendschein.
Graues Geflügel huschet
Neben dem Wasser her;
Wie Träume liegen die Inseln
Im Nebel auf dem Meer.
Ich höre des gärenden Schlammes
Geheimnisvollen Ton,
Einsames Vogelrufen –
So war es immer schon.
Noch einmal schauert leise
Und schweiget dann der Wind;
Vernehmlich werden die Stimmen,
Die über der Tiefe sind.
This translation aims to be singable to a Hummel setting, so it’s a bit la-la-la. With some borrowings, and as literal as I can make it:
Lagoon-ward flies the seagull
And dusk is closing in;
The sodden sand flats mirror
The evening glow.
Grey fowl scurry
Along the waterline;
Like dreams lie the islands
In mist upon the sea.
I hear the fermenting mud’s
Mysterious tone,
Solitary bird calls –
Thus it has ever been.
Once more the wind quivers
Quietly, and is still;
And audible grow the voices
That are above the deep.
And some disclosure: I stole it from somewhere on the net and fixed it a little by ear. I probably shouldn’t have, since I didn’t spot the oddity novembar, and since I quite possibly introduced a couple of new oddities myself.
I find this quite autumnal: Norman MacCaig’s “Descent from the Green Corrie”.
The climb’s all right, it’s the descent that kills you.
Knees become fists that don’t know how to clench
And thighs are strings in parallel.
Gravity’s still your enemy: it drills you
With your own backbone – its love is all to wrench
You down on screes or boggy asphodel.
And the elation that for a moment fills you
Beside the misty cairn’s that lesser thing,
A memory of it. It’s not
The punishing climb, it’s the descent that kills you
However sweetly the valled thrushes sing
And shadows darken with the peace they’ve brought.
From Kenneth Rexroth:
WHEN WE WITH SAPPHO
. . . about the cool water
the wind sounds through sprays
of apple, and from the quivering leaves
slumber pours down . . .”
We lie here in the bee filled, ruinous
Orchard of a decayed New England farm,
Summer in our hair, and the smell
Of summer in our twined bodies,
Summer in our mouths, and summer
In the luminous, fragmentary words
Of this dead Greek woman.
Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth.
Your grace is as beautiful as sleep.
You move against me like a wave
That moves in sleep.
Your body spreads across my brain
Like a bird filled summer;
Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
But like a nimbus that hovers
Over every other thing in all the world.
Lean back. You are beautiful,
As beautiful as the folding
Of your hands in sleep.
We have grown old in the afternoon.
Here in our orchard we are as old
As she is now, wherever dissipate
In that distant sea her gleaming dust
Flashes in the wave crest
Or stains the murex shell.
All about us the old farm subsides
Into the honey bearing chaos of high summer.
In those far islands the temples
Have fallen away, and the marble
Is the color of wild honey.
There is nothing left of the gardens
That were once about them, of the fat
Turf marked with cloven hooves.
Only the sea grass struggles
Over the crumbled stone,
Over the splintered steps,
Only the blue and yellow
Of the sea, and the cliffs
Red in the distance across the bay.
Lean back.
Her memory has passed to our lips now.
Our kisses fall through summer’s chaos
In our own breasts and thighs.
Gold colossal domes of cumulus cloud
Lift over the undulant, sibilant forest.
The air presses against the earth.
Thunder breaks over the mountains.
Far off, over the Adirondacks,
Lightning quivers, almost invisible
In the bright sky, violet against
The grey, deep shadows of the bellied clouds.
The sweet virile hair of thunder storms
Brushes over the swelling horizon.
Take off your shoes and stockings.
I will kiss your sweet legs and feet
As they lie half buried in the tangle
Of rank scented midsummer flowers.
Take off your clothes. I will press
Your summer honeyed flesh into the hot
Soil, into the crushed, acrid herbage
Of midsummer. Let your body sink
Like honey through the hot
Granular fingers of summer.
Rest. Wait. We have enough for a while.
Kiss me with your mouth
Wet and ragged, your mouth that tastes
Of my own flesh. Read to me again
The twisting music of that language
That is of all others, itself a work of art.
Read again those isolate, poignant words
Saved by ancient grammarians
To illustrate the conjugations
And declensions of the more ancient dead.
Lean back in the curve of my body,
Press your bruised shoulders against
The damp hair of my body.
Kiss me again. Think, sweet linguist,
In this world the ablative is impossible.
No other one will help us here.
We must help ourselves to each other.
The wind walks slowly away from the storm;
Veers on the wooded crests; sounds
In the valleys. Here we are isolate,
One with the other; and beyond
This orchard lies isolation,
The isolation of all the world.
Never let anything intrude
On the isolation of this day,
These words, isolate on dead tongues,
This orchard, hidden from fact and history,
These shadows, blended in the summer light,
Together isolate beyond the world’s reciprocity.
Do not talk any more. Do not speak.
Do not break silence until
We are weary of each other.
Let our fingers run like steel
Carving the contours of our bodies’ gold.
Do not speak. My face sinks
In the clotted summer of your hair.
The sound of the bees stops.
Stillness falls like a cloud.
Be still. Let your body fall away
Into the awe filled silence
Of the fulfilled summer —
Back, back, infinitely away —
Our lips weak, faint with stillness.
See. The sun has fallen away.
Now there are amber
Long lights on the shattered
Boles of the ancient apple trees.
Our bodies move to each other
As bodies move in sleep;
At once filled and exhausted,
As the summer moves to autumn,
As we, with Sappho, move towards death.
My eyelids sink toward sleep in the hot
Autumn of your uncoiled hair.
Your body moves in my arms
On the verge of sleep;
And it is as though I held
In my arms the bird filled
Evening sky of summer.
Here’s a draft of Rilke’s first stanza. Maybe we can cobble up something in common.
The translations that Principal linked are a useful source of spare parts. The version by Guntram Deichsel is good, but falters badly in the last line. Guntram Deichsel: as P enquired, who he ? Is it the G.D. of alien lizards in Topeka, Kansas (scroll down) ?
Wow, that was fast, thanks ! (You might want to leave this mysterious signpost standing, to confuse the competition)
We aim to confuse!
I’m gratified by the response to this post. Thank you very much for these wonderful poems!
Here is a raw rendition of the Rilke, so everybody starts off on the same footing:
The climb’s all right, it’s the descent that kills you.
dearie, there’s a teasing soupcon of Empson in that line, particularly because it’s repeated almost verbatim further down.
I liked that line. Let’s put the Empson up:
Studiolum,
I looked for the Pasternak translation, but my Russian’s not really up to finding it; however, I like the songs: I hadn’t heard Hungarian reggae before. A poem by Sándor Petőfi, who was killed in battle by the Russians in 1848-9, apparently inspired the only left-handed piece by Liszt (which “isn’t very good”, according to this Danish site — scroll down to “Liszt”).
And, talking of Liszt, the only place I haven’t mentioned the 23-year-old Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili is my own blog.
Grumbly, great minds think alike, I’d done more or less the same thing with the first line in the lab:
Lord, it is time. The immense summer gone,
I think you have to sacrifice too much to make it rhyme (fancy that George Szirtes rendering the whole think into rhyming anapaests). And I’d use a bit of filler for the metre, like so:
Lay your long shadow on the sundials
And on the meadows let the winds roam free.
Command the last fruits that they shall be full,
And give them yet two more southerly days,
Urge them on to perfection and [hic!] drive
A last sweetness into the heavy vine [or wine]
‘Jage’ I think has the meaning of ‘shunt’ or ‘drive’, as in ‘eine Spritze in den Arm jagen’, though the winds are probably dogs, so ‘hunt’ is also there.
And then in the last bit, the German sounds quite natural (‘keines mehr’, ‘wird es lange bleiben’), but in English avoiding the repetition of ‘home’ and ‘alone’ sounds like strenuous elegant variation, so:
Those who are homeless now will build no home.
Those now alone will long remain alone,
Keeping long hours, writing long letters, reading,
And pacing up and down the avenues
Restlessly, when the leaves are swirling.
or ‘keeping late hours’ if we’re suffering ‘long’ overkill.
‘Tother Empson probably, especially the second line (‘It is no the effort nor the failure tires’).
‘Jage’ I think has the meaning of ‘shunt’ or ‘drive’, as in ‘eine Spritze in den Arm jagen’, though the winds are probably dogs, so ‘hunt’ is also there.
There is that overtone in jage for today’s jaded ear, but in the raw translation I wanted to avoid suggesting that Rilke was thinking of God as a junky. However, even zum Teufel jagen is the wrong register for this poem. So I decided to let the winds go to the dogs.
‘Tother Empson probably, especially the second line
?? It’s the same Empson. Here’s a different one:
The Svalbard Seed Bank appears in The Futurama Holiday Spectacular.
I couldn’t find it on that link, but it’s appearing in other interesting places next Spring (my lips are sealed).
‘Tother villanelle, I mean, same oddly bearded fellow. Farmer Empson, hadn’t heard of him: is he like the Industrial Brueghel?
I know Farmer Empson only from the Archers, back in the days when Gabriel was still around. I listen to the series occasionally not for the plot, but the welter of social accents, all cunningly modulated by professional actors. As an American, I can only stand and stare. In terms of character motivation I usually understood only Joe and Eddie, but that just goes to show.
I couldn’t find it on that link
Right. I meant it was broadcast in the USA last night. I imagine it shows up everywhere before too long.
It appears in John Stewart et al.’s new book “Earth: A Visitor’s Guide To The Human Race” which my wife brought me from New York a month ago.
(I’m writing this from a halt in front of the same rebar net as the last time)
Oh, okay, it’s good to know what’s going on out there. Thanks to you both.
My wife spent nine hours on trains today. It’s got much better possibilities for using one’s time effectively than driving does. Apparently you can rent a computer hook-up or something.
15 cm of snow & 17C forecast tomorrow for southeastern BC so here’s my seasonal winter poem:
The more it snows ~~
tiddely pom,
The more it goes ~~
tiddely pom,
The more it goes ~~
tiddely pom
On snowing ~~
And nobody knows~~
tiddely pom ,
How cold my toes ~~
tiddely pom,
Are growing.
The More It Snows by A.A. Milne
I wish I’d thought of that.
Is that -17? Isn’t that very much colder than normal? It’s -7C here this morning, but it’s supposed to go down to -15 later on. Too bloody cold.
One of the best things about Pooh’s Hum for Snowy Weather is Piglet’s response: rather than admiring Pooh’s artistry in composing it, he says “It isn’t so much the toes as the ears.”
Yes! That’s one of the Piglet responses my mother has been repeating for at least the last fifty years.
It’s very much colder than normals – we’re humming poems to take our minds off the weather.
Hmm. So nobody’s done “Season of mists…” etc. Too obvious. When I thought about it I realised that both the poems I associate with autumn are about ploughing (which would be right) and about war. Which is probably a coincidence. There’s Thomas Hardy:
In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”
Thomas Hardy (1915)
I
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
II
Only a thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
III
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
And there’s Edward Thomas:
As the Team’s Head-Brass
As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.
The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole,
The ploughman said. ‘When will they take it away?’
‘When the war’s over.’ So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
‘Have you been out?’ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps?’
‘If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn’t want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more…Have many gone
From here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Many lost?’ ‘Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.’
‘And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.’ ‘Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.’ Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.
Although apparently he wrote it in May. But that’s already way too late for a spring ploughing.
I can’t do language, but perhaps I could speculate that the pallor of the parabola of joy is due to the waning sun of the autumnal equinox and thus earn Wodehouse points?
Double points, rr. I haven’t heard from you for ages. Thank you very much for this. It’s very good. I’m very glad you dropped it by.