By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Autumn is at once symbolic of plenty, ripening, harvest, and abundance; and, at the same time, a symbol of decay, decline, old age, and even death, with associations of things being past their prime. To understand this we need to look at how writers have depicted autumn in poetry and other literature.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
John Clare (1793-1864) is often overlooked in accounts of Romantic poetry, but he wrote sensitively and originally about the English countryside and his poetry displays a fine eye for local detail. He is regarded by some as the finest nature poet in the English language. His poem ‘Autumn’ showcases his rare talents, and repays closer analysis: consider the wonderful line ‘Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun’.
Autumn
The thistledown’s flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.
The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,
The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Now the leaves are falling fast’: so begins W. H. Auden’s ‘Autumn Song’, which features below in this compilation of ten of the best autumn poems in all of English literature. The following classic autumnal poems (or, to our readers in the US, the best poems about Fall) all … Read more
Dr Oliver Tearle’s summary of a classic modernist poem
‘Autumn’ by T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) is arguably the first modern poem in the English language. Written in 1908, it shows something different from the poetry being written by the Georgian poets such as Rupert Brooke and John Drinkwater, or the surviving ‘Victorian’ poets such as Thomas Hardy. Here is this short gem of a poem, with a few comments on it, that are designed to serve as preliminary analysis of its form, meaning, and imagery.