Autumn: a dirge
SMP director and Poetry & Pints regular Ted Gooda reflects on Shelley’s poem ‘Autumn: a dirge’
Ted Gooda, Sarah Nuttall, Mark Davies, Carol Hayton, David Hide
The ‘Poetry & Pints’ monthly meetings are now a well-established part of our community calendar at the Shelley Memorial Project, and there were a dozen of us at November’s meet up in the Bedford pub in Horsham.
We split into two groups for ease of sharing and discussion of the poetry, given that it was a Friday night and the pub was very busy!
As ever, there was a good mix of new poetry by the writers in the group alongside a great selection of some of the best-loved poems in the canon from Keats to Wilfred Owen, plus some less well-known poets.
Poetry & Pints regular, Sarah Nuttall, brought along A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year, (edited by Jane McMorland Hunter, Batsford Books, 2018) with each poem carefully chosen to ‘chime with the natural world through the seasons.’
A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year, (edited by Jane McMorland Hunter, Batsford Books, 2018)
How serendipitous then, that Shelley himself should feature on the very day of our meeting, with his poem Autumn: a dirge.
The poem was published by Mary Shelley in 1824, two years after Percy’s untimely death in Italy at the age of just twenty-nine, in the collection Posthumous Poems.
Editors and literary scholars have dated the poem to 1820, based on the original manuscripts and other correspondence dating from around that time. Shelley was already living in Italy by then, having moved there permanently in 1818 with Mary. They spent the next four years living in various locations and traveling throughout the country, including Turin, Milan, Venice, Florence, and Rome. The Italy he describes in this poem, however, feels very much like a British one!
Autumn is often used by poets to symbolise the inevitability of mortality, representing the transition from life to decay as summer's peak passes and winter's hardships approach.
And a dirge is, of course, a song or hymn of mourning, especially one intended for a funeral ceremony.
Shelley combines and makes judicious use of both ideas in the imagery in the first stanza.
Shelley’s autumn is devoid of golden harvests; instead, the fallen leaves form a ‘shroud’. The Year is on its deathbed, and the winter months themselves are called upon to mourn and keep vigil at the funeral and graveside of the dying Year, dressed in their ‘saddest array’.
Because the months are addressed directly, the ‘you’ of the poem invites the reader to share in the mourning and, as someone who hates this time of year and the turn in the seasons, this poem resonated strongly with me.
In the second stanza of the poem, the mood of sorrow and loss continues in the bleak imagery of absence and in the ‘chill’ falling rain and crawling worms.
The preponderance of present participle verbs, ‘falling’, ‘crawling’ ‘swelling’, and ‘knelling’ begin to feel like a kind of funereal litany.
Finally, just as the grief threatens to become relentless, there is a note of hope in the closing line, acknowledging that the tears of the more playful summer months, the ‘sisters’ of autumn, will eventually make the grave green.
It’s a wonderful image of the cycle of life.
Cheers!