September 21st and into Autumn. It would not be complete without John Keats’s Ode. True to form our garden is into some mellow fruitfulness.

Autumn’s Mellow Fruitfulness

Keats wrote “To Autumn” on September 19, 1819. He had just returned from a stroll while staying in the ancient city of Winchester. As he put it in a letter to a friend:

How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it….. I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now – Aye better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm – in the same way that some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.

And how glad we are that he did.

The grapevine ‘Brandt‘ loaded with fruit this year. If we don’t use them the birds will love these.

Autumn’s Music

‘Where are the songs of Spring?
Thou hast thy music too..

The songs of spring and summer may have passed, but early autumn has its own music too. The crisp crunch of biting into a fresh ripe apple, the thud of windfall fruit as it falls, the buzz of wasps after the fruit and the hum of bees visiting late flowers. The drip of honey fresh from the honeycomb or the oozings hour-by-hour of the crushed fruit in a cider press. We have the reassuring first autumn song of the robin after the quiet August, but, sadly, the twitter of swallows is missing here. Autumn sings quietly to us in honour of its Creator and ours.

Autumn mists and melancholy.

There is always a touch of sadness even melancholy in Autumn. For Keats it was specially so. His short life was full of problems:

It’s hard to be human. It’s quite hard to be 23, an orphan, and a struggling poet with little formal education whose father died when he was eight and whose mother died when he was 14, whose brother died of tuberculosis after he nursed him, and whose inheritance was withheld by a guardian so that he could not marry the woman he loved.

Camille Guthrieg

But, despite all this, we are so thankful that he managed to leave us such a legacy of lyrical, romantic, sensitive poetry.

Michaelmas – St Michael and all angels (September 29th)

The season of the late performers, the Michaelmas daises, is here. One name for them used to be Farewell Summer. Michaelmas was one of the old Quarter Days days for weighing the harvest, paying of dues, settling of accounts. The great day of reckoning still awaits. When Christ returns we shall all be called to give an account. In the traditional harvest hymn we sing ‘All is safely gathered in‘. But is it? Much of our sad world is still far from its Maker.

Summer’s legacy is fruit packed with sweetness to the core, bringing a sense of satisfaction, fulfillment and completion. Time to observe our harvest thanksgivings. They root us back in the soil of the countryside where we belong. ‘Husbandry‘ (the lovely old word for farming and gardening) slows us down to follow the quiet rhythms of the seasons, where there is no rush. Autumn’s mellowed tones and feeling of contentment reminds us to go gently with this earth in gratitude to our Creator.