Come, pensive Autumn, with thy clouds and storms
And falling leaves and pastures lost to flowers;
A luscious charm hangs on thy faded forms,
More sweet than Summer in her loveliest hours,
Who in her blooming uniform of green
Delights with samely and continued joy:
But give me, Autumn, where thy hand hath been,
For there is wildness that can never cloy –
The russet hue of fields left bare, and all
The tints of leaves and blossoms ere they fall.
In thy dull days of clouds a pleasure comes,
Wild music softens in thy hollow winds;
And in thy fading woods a beauty blooms
That’s more than dear to melancholy minds.
John Clare, To Autumn
John Clare’s observational details of the biodiversity of the British hedgerows and wetlands read like a Pre-Raphaelite study of nature. The autumnal imagery of the idyllic English countryside stimulates all the senses for the melancholy and the daydreamers. As you read his odes to Autumn, listen closely as golden light begins to glimmer along the river. It is the rustle of wood mice hurriedly scampering through thistle thickets weaved together with cobwebs as they harvest thistledown to line their winter dens.
A Pre-Raphaelite landscape both in writing and painting form provides a visual more detailed and vivid than any daydream I can conjure up. My autumnal escape as the California summer heat continues to radiate will be to George Price Boyce’s Abinger Mill-Pond, where gossamers twitter, fallow fields glitter, and swans glide upon the surface of liquid gold reflected from the russet hue of resting fields. In this post you will be presented with the seven poems John Clare dedicated to Autumn paired with the Pre-Raphaelite autumnal landscapes of George Price Boyce. One thing I have learned for certain from Clare’s words, Eternity can be found in the autumnal landscape.
The wild duck startles like a sudden thought,
And heron slow as if it might be caught.
The flopping crows on weary wings go by
And grey beard jackdaws noising as they fly.
The crowds of starnels whizz and hurry by,
And darken like a clod the evening sky.
The larks like thunder rise and suthy round,
Then drop and nestle in the stubble ground.
The wild swan hurries hight and noises loud
With white neck peering to the evening clowd.
The weary rooks to distant woods are gone.
With lengths of tail the magpie winnows on
To neighbouring tree, and leaves the distant crow
While small birds nestle in the edge below.
John Clare, Autumn Birds
Sweet little bird in russet coat,
The livery of the closing year,
I love thy lonely plaintive note
And tiny whispering song to hear,
While on the stile or garden seat
I sit to watch the falling leaves,
The song thy little joys repeat
My loneliness relieves.
John Clare, The Autumn Robin
The autumn morning waked by many a gun
Throws o’er the fields her many-coloured light
Wood wildly touched close-tanned and stubbles dun
A motley paradise for earth’s delight
Clouds ripple as the darkness breaks to light
And clover fields are hid with silver mist
One shower of cobwebs o’er the surface spread
And threads of silk in strange disorder twist
Round every leaf and blossom’s bottly head.
Hares in the drowning herbage scarcely steal
But on the battered pathway squats abed
And by the cart-rut nips her morning meal
Look where we may the scene is strange and new
And every object wears a changing hue
John Clare, Autumn Morning
The rustling of leaves under the feet in woods
and under hedges;
The crumpling of cat-ice and snow down wood-rides,
narrow lanes and every street causeway;
Rustling through a wood or rather rushing, while the wind
halloos in the oak-toop like thunder;
The rustle of birds’ wings startled from their nests or flying
unseen into the bushes;
The whizzing of larger birds overhead in a wood, such as
crows, puddocks, buzzards;
The trample of robins and woodlarks on the brown leaves.
and the patter of squirrels on the green moss;
The fall of an acorn on the ground, the pattering of nuts on
the hazel branches as they fall from ripeness;
The flirt of the groundlark’s wing from the stubbles –
how sweet such pictures on dewy mornings, when the
dew flashes from its brown feathers.
John Clare, Pleasant Sounds
I love the fitful gust that shakes
The casement all the day,
And from the glossy elm tree takes
The faded leaves away,
Twirling them by the window pane
With thousand others down the lane.
I love to see the shaking twig
Dance till the shut of eve,
The sparrow on the cottage rig,
Whose chirp would make believe
That Spring was just now flirting by
In Summer’s lap with flowers to lie.
I love to see the cottage smoke
Curl upwards through the trees,
The pigeons nestled round the cote
On November days like these;
The cock upon the dunghill crowing,
The mill sails on the heath a-going.
The feather from the raven’s breast
Falls on the stubble lea,
The acorns near the old crow’s nest
Drop pattering down the tree;
The grunting pigs, that wait for all,
Scramble and hurry where they fall.
John Clare, Autumn
New Essays on John Clare: Poetry, Culture and Community
by Simon Kövesi and Scott McEathron (2017)
John Clare: Selected Poems
by John Clare (2004)
