20 March: Boreham on Autumn Leaves

Autumn Leaves
[NB. FWB is writing from the southern hemisphere!]
There must be few persons who have not been more or less deeply impressed, in recent years, by the emphatic and almost painful detachment of the seasons. They go their way and leave us to go ours. They do not meddle with our affairs, they brook no interference on our part with theirs. Come war or peace, gladness or grief, Spring bursts in vernal freshness from the barrenness of Winter, and Autumn follows somberly on the golden riot of Summer. The same feeling haunts us, in a more vague and nebulous way, as we mark the risings and settings of the sun, the waxings and wanings of the moon, the ebbings and flowings of the tide, and the formation, night after night, of the starry constellations. But suns and stars do not affect us quite as the seasons do. Those celestial bodies are infinitely remote. We know very little about them, and there are few points of sympathy between them and ourselves.

But the seasons are near at hand. They give tone and character to the experiences of every day. They enter directly and intimately into our lives and yet, with a disregard that appears contemptuous, they behave as though they had no interest in us. With all the empires of the earth staggering in unprecedented convulsion, the birds have sung their mating songs in the Springtime as though no drop of blood were being shed, and the leaves have taken on their dapple tints in Autumn as though things were as they have always been. With Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, it is business-as-usual, age in and age out. During the American Civil War, Whittier was impressed by the same thought—

So, calm and patient, Nature keeps
Her ancient promise well
Though o'er
her bloom and greenness sweeps
The battle-breath of hell.
Ah, eyes may
well be full of tears
And hearts with hate are hot;
But even-paced come
round the years
And Nature changes not.

Whittier argues that Nature's tranquillity is based on her clearer view of the good that will be born of so much suffering, and the thought was never more grateful than is at this hour.[1]

Is Autumn Depressing Or Invigorating?
Of Autumn all this is particularly true. No season has been so much misunderstood and so persistently misterpreted. The minstrels who have undertaken to sing the songs of Autumn have almost invariably set their songs in a minor key. Autumn, they have told us, is the twilight of the year; Autumn is sunset; Autumn is decline decrepitude; Autumn is the season at which things make haste to die. The literature of Autumn is steeped in the bleakest pessimism. To this general rule there are, of course, notable exceptions. Miss Wilhelmina Stitch is one of them. In Autumn Miss Stitch sees nothing depressing. The lines in which she celebrates the splendours of Autumn stand out against the misereres and jeremiads of the more pretentious bards as a brilliant rocket stands out against the darkness of a pitch-black night. Her song stirs the blood like a trumpet blast that immediately follows a dirge—

Oh for a caravan right now! That I may travel at my ease
And stare at every
flaming bough, drink in the beauty of the trees.
The Springtime's dainty pink
and white can rouse a gentle ecstasy,
But Autumn's colours, flashing bright,
they make a vagabond of me!

It is part of the peculiarity of Autumn that she rushes upon us somewhat abruptly. None of the other seasons appears so suddenly. In one of his inimitable word paintings, Richard Jefferies points out that it is almost possible to record the precise day on which Autumn makes her appearance. There are, it is true, one or two premonitory signs of her approach. The leaves of the lime begin to fade, tell-tale spots of lemon colour bespangle the silver birch, and a suspicious tinge of yellow sweeps across the fern. But all at once a more decided change mantles the whole horizon. As though beneath a wizard's wand, the hedgerows become bronze and russet and purple and saffron, the birds in the copses become ominously silent, the grasshoppers vanish from banks and from meadows, and the furze on the moorland sparkles in the morning with the dew-drenched webs of innumerable spiders. All this breaks upon us suddenly, telling us that Summer is a thing of yesterday.

Nature Braced For A New Adventure
Nature in Autumn reminds us of nothing so much as of the excited child who, delighted that their antics have given the beholders pleasure, instantly proceeds to repeat the performance. Proud of her golden harvests and her luscious fruitage, the earth makes up her mind to do the whole thing over again and she proceeds to gather up all her powers for the prodigious undertaking. Penelope sets to work at this season of the year to unravel her wondrous web, taking to pieces in the Autumn the dainty tapestries and delicate embroideries that she wove with such deft fingers in the Spring. The flutter of the leaf to the ground and the return of the sap to the root are essential items in this beneficient programme. The leaves fall off because the new and tender buds are already in formation. They vanish so that the blustering winds may lose their power over the budding branches, and the frail yet mighty potentialities that slumber in those bare boughs are thus saved from gusty violence.

The rustle of Autumn leaves announces, therefore, not a dead end, but a new beginning. Autumn is aglow with promise and radiant with hope. By every richly-tinted leaf she tells of a better day dawning. If her last harvest was poor she will now endeavour to atone; if it was good, she will attempt a still more splendid achievement. Those who have looked into the face of Autumn and thought her gloomy have woefully misunderstood her. There is in those rustling leaves a whisper of exultation and confidence. Those who attune their ears to her secret melody will detect in it an assurance that, good as may have been the past, the best is yet to be.

F W Boreham

Image: Autumn Leaves

[1] This is a reference to war time, the editorial appearing in the Hobart Mercury on Saturday 1 May, 1943.