Autumn Approaches

It was dark by a quarter past eight tonight. The nights drawing in coupled with dew on the grass, and on the saddle of my bike yesterday morning, signal the end of the summer. Well, those things along with Nathalie returning to school, the start of the Rugby Union World Cup and Barcelona winning their first home game in the league.

There is something wistful about Autumn. If Spring is the time of awakenings, of planning ahead, of thinking about the summer to come then the onset of Autumn is a time for reflection, of putting the garden to bed of looking back before looking forward again. Whereas the Summer is for getting out and about Autumn is about staying in, it's about lamb stew and dumplings, of listening to the rain and wind and planting bulbs.

The poem 'To Autumn' by John Keats is probably the best loved of his works and he wrote it during a stay in Winchester on 19 September 1819. John Keats literary career lasted less than three and a half years during which time he wrote 150 poems.

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-eves 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.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

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.