Guest Author - Lane Graciano
When autumn is personified, she is the woman of Robert Burns’s Brigs of Ayr: “All-cheering Plenty, with her flowing horn, / … yellow Autumn, wreath’d with nodding corn.” This is likely to be Gaia, the Earth goddess of ancient Greece. The “flowing horn” is the mythical cornucopia (Latin for “horn of plenty”) – a hollow goat’s horn overflowing with fruits, flowers, nuts and grains. This icon of late summer’s harvest now signifies Thanksgiving Day, celebrated in early October by Canadians and in late November by Americans.
The wreath of corn also represents autumn as the Greek harvest goddess Demeter, or her Roman counterpart Ceres. (The word “corn” originally meant grain of any kind, including wheat, oats and maize.) When Hades abducted Demeter’s daughter, the goddess neglected the dying natural world until she had recovered Persephone from the underworld. Thus, autumn is a season of abundance and comfort tinged with an air of melancholy, desolation and mortality.
Autumn is a time of bittersweet transition – from blithe summer days to long winter nights, from youth to careworn age, from life itself to stasis and death before the rebirth of spring. These dichotomies appealed to poets from temperate zones, such as William Blake and the Romantics. The most famous Romantic ode is John Keats’ To Autumn, in which the season is one of “mists and mellow fruitfulness,” arriving “to load and bless” vines with fruit, to bend apple trees, and to “fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.”
In the popular imagination, autumn’s apples represent the unnamed fruit that Adam and Eve ate. For this we can thank Renaissance artists who painted symbols from classical mythology in their renderings of biblical scenes. Thus, the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden was conflated with the golden apples of immortality growing in Hera’s garden. It’s also tantalizing to associate the fall season with the Fall of Man, but there is probably no connection.
Keats’s poem echoes not only the title of an earlier ode by Blake but also many of its images. Blake’s opens with the lines: “O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained / With the blood of the grape … ” The grape’s dark color connotes mortality, and its stain on the season evokes biblical meanings. As Robert Browning wrote, autumn wins poets over with “its mute / Appeal to sympathy for its decay.” In The Death of the Flowers, William Cullen Bryant calls the season a period of “melancholy days … the saddest of the year,” a time “of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear.”
A corresponding image from fiction that comes to mind is from The Road by Cormac McCarthy: “With the first grey light he rose … and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure.” The adjectives certainly describe Browning’s season of decay, a setting that intensifies the post-apocalyptic atmosphere. As McCarthy’s two unnamed characters trudge along the titular road, the landscape becomes wintry – and we know instinctively that one of them will not survive the journey.
The changing seasons also form the setting of the elegiac Russian comedy The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov. In the opening scene, the family’s treasured cherry trees are in blossom and Ranyevskaya, the matriarch, still hopes she can save her ancestral home from the auction block. But by the closing act, the family remains in debt and has no choice but to vacate the premises. The whole household packs up except for Lopakhin, the businessman who has bought the cherry orchard for future development: “October out there, but the sun’s shining.… Good building weather.” The other characters prepare to go their separate ways. Ranyevskaya laments: “Oh my dear orchard, my sweet and lovely orchard! My life, my youth, my happiness – farewell!” Varya, her adopted daughter, murmurs: “… no more life in this house. Never again.” The play ends with the sound of axes coming from the orchard.
Yet the somberness of autumn can also represent the newfound maturity of a young character. At the end of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, 8-year-old Scout realizes that Boo Radley has quietly looked after her and her brother over the past two years. She summarizes their experiences as the seasons passed: summer, autumn, winter, summer, and back again to autumn. “As I made my way home, I felt very old,” Scout narrates. “I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn’t much else left for us to learn, except possibly algebra.” Thus, for all their melancholy, literary autumns do remind us that the season is but an arc in a cycle of contemplation and regeneration.
