'We Enter Again November'

The final stanza of Howard Nemerov’s “Elegy of Last Resort” from his second collection, Guide to the Ruins (1950): 

“We enter again November; cold late light

 Glazes the field, a little fever of love,

 Held in numbed hands, admires the false gods;

 While lonely on this coast the sea bids us

 Farewell, and the salt crust hardens toward winter.”

 

The poem first appeared in the Autumn 1948 issue of The Sewanee Review, three years after Nemerov's discharge from the service at age twenty-five. After graduating from Harvard in 1941, he had flown fifty combat missions with the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot and another fifty-seven with the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force. As we expect with the work of  a young poet, we hear self-conscious echoes – of Eliot and Auden, and an allusion to Death in Venice. The poem evokes life entering dormancy and suggests the tawdry sadness of Atlantic City in the off-season (“The boardwalks are empty, the cafes closed,” it begins.)

 

In “The Consent,” published more than thirty years later in Sentences (198o), Nemerov returns to November, this time recounting the odd behavior of ginkgo trees: They drop all of their leaves on a single night:

 

“Late in November, on a single night

Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees

That stand along the walk drop all their leaves

In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind

But as though to time alone: the golden and green

Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday

Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.

 

“What signal from the stars? What senses took it in?

What in those wooden motives so decided

To strike their leaves, to down their leaves,

Rebellion or surrender? and if this

Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt?

What use to learn the lessons taught by time,

If a star at any time may tell us: Now.”

 

Ginkgo biloba first evolved in East Asia during the Middle Jurassic epoch some 170 million years ago. We think of them, figuratively, as living fossils. In recent years they have gained popularity in the West for their reputed health benefits. Their fan-shaped leaves turn a buttery yellow in the fall and are the most beautiful in the world. Nemerov mentions none of this. He reminds us that we are as mortal as leaves. We dismiss determinism and proudly parade our free will. What force beyond us might some early winter night erase us from creation? Clearly, apart from their beauty, gingkoes intrigued Nemerov.

 

Poets and other writers develop private lexicons of reference. Some dwell on October. Whether consciously or otherwise, November appears throughout Nemerov’s work, an uneasy spell between autumn and winter.