Where Are the Songs of Spring?
The Purpose of Reading and the Peculiar Mood of Autumn
After an abnormally hot September and early October, autumn has finally arrived here in Minnesota. Over the last week or so, a number of texts I’ve read have served to focus in my mind a peculiar autumnal mood. We don’t have a precise word in English that captures the feel that I mean. I can describe it in many words, but the feeling is a unitary thing, rather than many things. Perhaps the best approach to helping you enter into and savor this mood with me, which is something I think worth doing, is to call your attention to the texts that called this mood to my mind.
In his fine Substack newsletter, Anthony Esolen recently profiled John Keats’ poem “To Autumn.” It’s from this poem that the title of this post is taken. Speaking directly to Autumn personified, having recalled the harvests and abundance that constitute the feel of early autumn, Keats closes the poem by gently calling to mind the feeling of loss and of dying that succeeds that early extension of summer:
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.That early prodigality of life at its close which is the feel of early fall gives way to the bleakness and uncanniness, the saturnine melancholy, of later autumn. Around the same time that Keats returned my attention to the feel of early autumn, one of my children had to memorize Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. If Keats’ poem seems to take place in late September or early October (at least, that’s how it feels in the contemporary Upper Midwest), The Raven is explicitly said to take place at the very end of autumn, on the cusp of winter, in the “bleak December”:
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.
The feel of autumn as such, not the feel of early autumn or the feel of late autumn, but the distinctive mood of autumn as a whole, as a unitary thing, is bookended for me by the feel of these two stanzas. The desire to express unique moods is for me among the peculiar motives that lead me to many of the books and poems I read. My reading is sometimes purposeful and systematic, but more often dilettantish and occasional. Since I’d like to be virtuous, I spend a lot of time reflecting on my motives for my acts, including my reading.
Sometimes, I read because I want to get a better handle on the human condition. In his recent, brilliant, if rather narrow book on philosophy of the arts, Beauty and Imitation, Daniel McInerny argues that art is imitative: it re-presents reality in an artistic medium, thereby allowing us to delightfully contemplate it. The reality that art presents, he says, is some part of the human quest for happiness. He thinks that art is almost always narrative, showing us a slice of the human drama, the human attempt at achieving flourishing. (I have a more complete assessment of McInerny’s book coming out soon in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.)
That account is rather plausible to me, especially as it relates to the art of writing and why I chose to read. I do often read in order to better see and understand the human condition. I read for the sake of plot, for the sake of excitedly following the course of actions, as human persons together pursue fulfillment. I read for the sake of the characters, to contemplate those persons themselves, like gazing at a snapshot of their interior state at a particular moment of their pilgrimage toward beatitude. I read for the sake of the setting, to contemplate the imagined world the author has created as a setting for the drama of personal life. I read philosophically, to gain some insight into the human condition as such, to draw forth an enduring moral or metaphysical lesson from the flux of action. All of those goals in reading seem to me very important, and key parts of the singular delight of reading.
But while these seem to me to be among my motives in reading, this account strikes me as too narrow. Art doesn’t only present the human drama. Part of human life, as I’ve contended in prior posts, is the ability to turn away from merely human pursuits and to just contemplate the world at large. Paradoxically, unless we contemplate things for their own sake, and don’t just attend to the pursuit of happiness, we cannot be happy. Happiness is a gift; it cannot be seized. Art can help us with that contemplation as well.
One way in which art can help us enter into purely contemplative activity is that it can present a mood, as in the mood of autumn captured in those poems. It can help us attend to that particular mood and savor it. I was most recently reminded of the ability of art to do nothing but present and savor a mood a few months ago when Susanna and I watched the Australian film Picnic at Hanging Rock. In terms of plot and characters, this film is rather thin and unresolved. But in its cinematography, its editing, and above all the juxtaposition of images and music, it serves to present a remarkably distinctive mood: a sense of undefined uncanniness and vague horror, coupled with half-formed feelings of adolescent friendship, sexuality, loss, and despair, suffused with the baking heat and light of high summer. (Though the film takes place in February, around St. Valentine’s Day, it takes place in Australia, and, so, it is summertime.) There’s no word in English for that precise, consistent feel which is savored by this film from beginning to end. To get exactly the mood that is meant here, you have to watch the film.
Something similar happened to me with those poems by Keats and Poe: coupled together, they present an autumnal mood, as something real, something not reducible to the human drama, something worth contemplating. With these two poems coloring my outlook for the last week or so, I was primed to notice aspects of two other books in which features of this mood of autumn are presented.
The first of these books was The Fellowship of the Ring, which I’m reading for probably the 25th time in my life for a book club I’m in (“The Badly Read Dads”, which we named in imitation of the more famous women’s book club, Well Read Mom). J.R.R. Tolkien is deeply attentive to times and seasons, and the main action of the book opens in late September, with all the gold of harvest and changing leaves suffusing the open journeys of the book. The action then proceeds into the bleak bareness of late autumn, with the horror of the Black Riders being matched by the season fading to winter. As I read it, there are echoes here of Mole going to the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows, with the somber mood of leafless trees and fading grasses in empty lands being matched by a rising sense of horror and uncanniness. That’s what Mole feels as he sets off to see Badger, beset by weasels and stoats; that’s what Frodo and company feel as they go into the wilderness to reach Rivendell, pursued by the Black Riders.
The associations that have been growing in my mind between the feel of The Raven, the growing terror of The Lord of the Rings and the Wild Wood chapter of The Wind in the Willows, and the decline of the year as autumn proceeds around me in the real world have helped me deal with another aspect of autumn, one that I don’t particularly enjoy: the grotesque and gaudy lawn “art” that pops up around my neighborhood in ever greater profusion as October proceeds. Just in the streets around my house, there are plastic human skeletons climbing out of graves, human skeletons grilling dog skeletons, a human skeleton walking a triceratops skeleton on a leash, a human skeleton wearing a Hawaiian shirt, an inflatable unicorn skeleton, etc., etc.
I dislike the crass commercialism and banal occultism of these decorations. But I’ve tried to see them through the sense of the total autumnal mood that’s been growing in my mind. They are people’s sad but genuine attempts to participate in the uncanny sense of death and of the borders between this world and the otherworld becoming thin. That sense, as the year slants toward its death and rebirth in December, is an integral part of the autumnal mood. It’s not just an awareness of death, of needing to pray for the holy souls, and so on. It’s also, as Poe displays in The Raven, a sense for the world as a hostile place, as including forces—represented by undead Black Riders and grotesque skeletons—that work against life. The horrific underlayer of the world appears against the fading browns and grays of the season, plastic demonic figures on dying grass. The autumnal mood includes preternatural terror coupled with muted melancholy: H.P. Lovecraft’s unspeakable monsters inserted into a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, or Black Riders in the dell at Weathertop.
The second book in which attention to autumn arose is one I’m re-reading to my children, Howard Pyle’s The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions, the third in his King Arthur series. Pyle’s book, like Tolkien’s, is heavily plot and character driven, but it also includes sections designed purely to communicate a mood. One does this for an aspect of the autumn mood. While Tolkien’s autumn mood is, perhaps, closer to Poe’s, Pyle’s is closer to Keats’:
Now some there be who love the summer time the best and some there be that love the spring: yet others still there be who love the autumn the best of all. And certes each season hath its beauties, so that one cannot wonder that there are some who love the beauties of the fall above the beauties of all other seasons. For in that time of the year there comes the nutting season, when country folk take joy in being abroad in the hazel thickets, gathering the bright brown fruits of the hazel bushes. Then are days so clear and frosty, all early in the morning, that it is as though the whole vault of heaven were made of clear crystal. Then, when you look into the cold blue shadows of the wayside bank, there you behold everywhere the sparkling of many myriads of bright points of light where the thin frosts catch the shining of the early and yet slanting sun. Then do the birds cry with a wilder note as though heralding the approach of dreary winter. Then do the squirrels gambol in the dry, dead foliage in search of their winter store of food. Then is all the world clad very gloriously in russet and gold, and when the bright and jolly sun shines down through the thin yellow leaves of the woodland, all the earth appears to be illuminated with a wonderful splendor of golden light, so that it may be that even the glory of Paradise is not more wonderful than that unusual radiance. (Dover, p. 311-312)
Here too, as with The Lord of the Rings, a host of associations come to mind, all of which add to the complexity and fulsomeness of the autumn mood. If Frodo’s autumn journey reminds me of Mr. Mole in Wind in the Willows, this passage from the King Arthur stories puts me in mind of Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin, and C.S. Lewis’ reflections on Nutkin as giving a sense of fall and far northern forests. Autumn is not only an uncanny time, not only a time of fading to death and otherworldly fears, but a time of golden glory, of trees clothed in colors in majesty.
My point in all this is to give some voice to a mood that has been building upon me these last few weeks, a mood that is complex yet unitary, all of these texts and feelings blending in a single sense of autumn. I also want to exhort you to similarly contemplate given moods, not as mere states of human psychology or of the human quest for happiness, but given, objective features of reality, observable by human persons, but distinct from them. The mood of autumn—like the mood of spring or the mood embodied in great works of music—is as real as the fading trees and the slanting light itself. It is worth reading, and listening, and looking more attentively so as to contemplate such moods as things in themselves.