The bewitching beauty and sensuous charms of autumn season has inspired poetsacross time, countries and culture
By Manzoor Akash
Autumn holds a special place in literature with its fascinating artwork of golden-hued trees, glistening natural beauty, crispy leaves and unique grandeur which has fired up the imagination of poets and writers through generations. As the resplendent season sets in, the inspiring poetry of writers surpasses the ravages of time due to their eloquence and mellifluousness. It has been beautifully dealt with, in literature and as Wordsworth wrote: “Wild is the music of autumnal winds amongst the faded woods”.
No doubt, other seasons are significant equally, yet, the charm and bliss of ‘the season of fall’, is mesmerizing time of the year to be aestheticized and appreciated. Its bewitching beauty and serenity, has intrigued poets across time, countries and culture; all of whom have envisioned the season as a passing phase in Nature’s continuous process of decay and renewal to create the ambience of the season’s ascetic spirit that is represented through poetry. ‘Autumn is a second spring, says Albert Camus, when every leaf is a flower’.
The poets’ season of bare boughs, fading flowers, withered crispy leaves, etc. is envisaged as an abstract and pristine feminine beauty, which appears through the fleeting shadows of cirrus clouds that resemble the fluttering of her dewy veil, in the golden sunbeams which gives a message that everything that blooms has to fade away one day.
Among the late 18th century English Romantic poets, John Keats and William Blake, autumn is represented as a celebration of plenty, a harbinger of winter and encapsulates the theme of poverty and a mystic melancholia. Keats, in his three stanza poem, ‘Ode to Autumn’ (written in 1819) describes autumn as: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun…The third stanza of the poem similarly goes on the season as:
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay,
Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast they music too,-
The visionary English writer William Blake, in the same context, refers to the joys, colors and emotions of autumn in his pastoral and evocative poem ‘To Autumn’ as:
O! Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grapes, pass not, but sir
Beneath my shady roof; there thou mayst rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe…
W. Shakespeare, who is widely regarded as the greatest dramatist in the English language, presents the season’s ascetic spirit and intriguing beauty in one of his poems like:
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set.
In the Western countries, autumn is identified as ‘fall’- the connotative of maturity and end, as appears in P.B.Shelly’s poem, Autumn: A Dirge and Thomas Hood’s ode on Autumn. Hood visualizes autumn, as an aged male figure whose ‘coronet of golden corn’ conveys the archetypal image of the season and yet, who is ‘shaking the languid licks all dewy bright/ with tangled gossamer that fell by night’. Towards the end of his ‘Ode to the West Wind’, Shelly too like Keats, views autumn as a part of
Nature’s unending process of change because he represents the West Wind, not only as winter (symbolizes death) harbinger, but also, a dynamic cleansing force pointing at a renewal, just as his concluding remark affirms: The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
While praising the enchanting beauty of autumn, in his gazal, “Jab Bahar Ayee” (When Autumn Came), one of the most celebrated, and influential Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, says:
This is the way that autumn came to the trees:
it stripped them down to the skin,
left their ebony bodies naked.
It shook out their hearts, the yellow leaves,
scattered them over the ground…
However, Azeen Hyder and Ahmad Faraz, has described autumn in their poetry quite beautifully, but distinctly. According to Azeen Hyder, like autumn season when trees shed their leaves, his existence also gets scattered. He writes:
Mausam-e- Khizan Ke Patton Ki Tarah Jhar Gaya,
Mera Wajood Tere Tan Se Juda Hoker Bekher Gaya.
In the same way, Ahmad Faraz writes:
Jab Khizan Ayegi To Lout Ayegay Who Bhi,
Wo Baharon Main Zara Kam He Nikla Karte Hai.
Besides scores of English and Urdu writers, the autumn splendor has also inspired Indian writers as well (impossible to cite all). In many of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems and songs, the season is manifested through the abundance of ripe crops in the fields that is ‘the golden gift of autumn for Mother Earth’. The festive spirit of autumn initiates a holiday mood in human mind, an expression of that has been recorded in one of his seasonal poems in the poetic drama Nataraj, where Tagore writes:
Autumn gives a home-leaving call in a holidaying note-
He flutters the wings of swan and makes it fly afar;
As the shuili-buds bloom on its stem, he calls it back…
Known in Kashmir as ‘harud’, the breathtaking season arrives with the magnificent golden and crimson leaf fall, thereby, enveloping the entire region with misty mornings, warm and sunny days but evenings have a cool nip, the reminder of coming winter. Here, the lovely Chinar trees wear a majestic look to make the whole set-up look so captivating by shedding their leaves, bountifully which has, not only served a stimulus to the creative minds like Habba Khatoon, Lal Ded, Sheikh-ul-Alam, Rasool Mir, Mahjoor, et.al but, also creates an enchanting environment to attract hundreds of visitors, across the globe, to enthrall themselves in the serene locales and wonderful environs of Srinagar’s Naseem Bagh, Nishat & Shalimar Gardens, etc, and elsewhere. The Kashmiri born American poet, Agha Shahid Ali, who desired to die in Kashmir, in autumn, couldn’t restrain himself to say:
I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir, and
The shadowed routine of each vein will almost be news,
The blood censored, for the saffron sun and the times of rain…
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The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of this Magazine. The author can be reached at [email protected]
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