'Again, Great Season'

Like the rest of us, poets often favor certain times of the year. They return to a season or month they find thematically or emotionally rich. Keats, obviously, was an autumn man. Winter I associate with Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. Howard Nemerov sub-specialized in autumn blurring into winter. In the North, that signifies October, with early echoes, some years, in September. At that time, out in the fields, the golden rod is tall and turning brown. The goldfinches are busy harvesting thistle seeds. The asters grow dense and bend to the ground. They will survive until after the first snow. I can remember snow falling on my birthday, October 26, when I was a kid in Cleveland. Here is Nemerov’s “Again” (The Western Approaches, 1975): 

“Again, great season, sing it through again

Before we fall asleep, sing the slow change

That makes October burn out red and gold

And color bleed into the world and die,

And butterflies among the fluttering leaves

Disguise themselves until the few last leaves

Spin to the ground or to the skimming streams

That carry them along until they sink,

And through the muted land, the nevergreen

Needles and mull and duff of the forest floor,

The wind go ashen, till one afternoon

The cold snow cloud comes down the intervale

Above the river on whose slow black flood

The few first flakes come hurrying in to drown.”

 

A single long sentence across fourteen lines, moving like the season itself, inexorably. In Texas, I miss the drama of seasonal change. Here it’s still high summer, near one-hundred degrees every day. This could last for months. Nemerov’s theme is change, nature’s perpetual self-renewal.

 

Duff is Homer Simpson’s beer of choice, a common surname and Arabic for “drum,” but the OED gives seven definitions -- four nouns, an adjective, two verbs – from “dough, paste” to “the buttocks, the backside” (as in “Get off your duff”). “Up the duff,” we learn, means “pregnant,” and “duff” in golf means “to perform (a shot) badly” (thus, “duffer”). Best of all, “duff” is the stuff on the ground in a forest, decaying leaves, needles, branches and bark, midway between living biomass and soil. This is Nemerov’s sense. Richard Wilbur uses it this way in “To Ishtar”:

 

“It is all we can do to witness

The waste motions of empty trees,

The joyless tittering duff, the grass-mats

Blanched and scurfy with ice.”

 

Here is another of Howard Nemerov’s poems dedicated to change and the arrival of his favorite time of year, “The Crossing” (Gnomes and Occasions, 1973):

 

“September, and the butterflies are drifting

Across the sky again, the monarchs in

Their myriads, delicate lenses for the light

To fall through and be mandarin-transformed.

 

“I guess they are flying southward, or anyhow

That seems to be the average of their drift,

Though what you mostly see is a random light

Meandering, a Brownian movement to the wind,

 

“Which is one of Nature's ways of getting it done,

Whatever it may be, the rise of hills

And settling of seas, the fall of leaf

Across the shoulder of the northern world,

 

“The snowflakes one by one that silt the field . . .

All that's preparing now behind the scene,

As the ecliptic and equator cross,

Through which the light butterflies are flying.”