'In the Land of Maple, Burning Rampart in Mist'

Some books and poems are permanently keyed to a time of year, and often to a well-remembered place. October means the Five Rivers Environmental Education Center in Delmar, N.Y., south of Albany, where my oldest son and I for years hiked every Saturday. There’s a sloping field that leads to a pond where in the summer we caught frogs and fed the Canada geese. In September and into October, dozens of American goldfinches fed on a patch of thistle at the center of the field. Soon the golden rod darkened, grasses turned brown, seed pods on milkweed burst and spewed fluff, and only the asters were left in bloom, even under early snow. In memory, that scene is captioned by a stanza from the fourth section, “Fire, October, Eyes,” of Guy Davenport’s book-length poem Flowers and Leaves (1966):

“In burnt October, brown, in the fourteenth day,

Beyond the fields in the wash of river wind,

The trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,

Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves,

And apples ripe in the orchards and trellised grapes,

Late bees in buckwheat drone and the world is rust.

The sky is transparent after rain. Now from the field

Father comes at the daughter’s call. Come to the entry

Mother, to the front door, come. Come.

Under parting smoke, quiet with fear, Jackson

To his captains said, Give them then the bayonet.”

It is perhaps Davenport’s least-read book, a collector’s item in the original Jargon Society edition, and far too beholden to Pound and Zukofsky. But there are passages I love, and the poem is dedicated to Charles Ives and seems suffused with his old-fashioned Americanness. Eighteen stanzas later, Davenport writes:

“Beyond the virgin blossom, motherleaf, amber berry,

Leaf transmutes to flame; October Chocorua

In the land of maple, burning rampart in mist.”

William James had a summer home in Chocorua, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and died there in 1910. Davenport’s lines bring to mind the philosopher’s brother, Henry James, in a passage from “New England: An Autumn Impression,” the first chapter in The American Scene (1907). James’ metaphor is recognizably Jamesian; that is, social and familial. If it weren’t so witty and right, we might almost suspect parody. It’s never prudent to underestimate the James’ sense of the comic:

 “. . . the way the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes.”