Sitting in Bewley’s of Grafton Street on Thursday morning, I thought of the poet Baudelaire, the way you do. It must have been the open fire nearby, which was roaring, even though this was still only August 30th and the air temperature outside was a near-balmy 15 degrees.
But suddenly from somewhere – possibly Google – the opening lines of his Chant d'automne (Song of Autumn) crossed my mind: "Soon we shall plunge into the cold darkness;/Farewell, vivid brightness of our short-lived summers!/Already I hear the dismal sound of firewood/Falling with a clatter on the courtyard pavements."
It was a bit early for such gloom, as it was for the open fire. But even so, the change of seasons was now undeniable. Leaves were falling. The schools were back. I had already caught the redolent aroma of the year’s first reopened pencil case, sealed since June.
Yes, the famous long hot summer of 2018 was over. It was time to move on, as another poet – Van Morrison – put it in his (somewhat more cheerful) Autumn Song: "Pitter patter, the rain falling down/Little glamour, sun coming round/Take a walk when autumn comes to town."
There is no rain forecast this coming weekend, in Dublin at least. But the unseasonal outbreak of an All-Ireland football final will only hasten the early end of summer, if it's still lingering by then.
I’m reminded of the complaint of a relative who used to work in Helsinki, and who admired the Finns in most things, but had his head done in annually, on the first of September, when they switched off all the public fountains in preparation for the coming freeze.
The sun would still be shining. The first sub-zero temperatures were still at least two months away. But it was as if they were tired of summer, and all its frivolities, and eager to embrace the winter that was more in keeping with their personalities.
Still, premature as it seems this year, I love autumn, or at least its onset, which is always as full of promise as spring. It may not give me such raptures as it did Gerard Manley Hopkins, who "in a half an hour of extreme enthusiasm" on September 1st, 1877, wrote the poem Hurrahing for Harvest:
“Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise/Around; up above, what wind-walks! What lovely behaviour/Of silk-sack clouds! Has wilder, wilful-wavier/Meal-drift moulted ever and melted across skies?”
My feelings are closer to those expressed in a poem I didn't have to Google, because we learned it at school: Thomas Kinsella's Another September. That portrays the coming season as a cow: "Domestic Autumn, like an animal/Long used to handling by those countrymen,/Rubs her kind hide against the bedroom wall."
And there is something reassuringly earthy about autumn. It seems to bring us back to basics, to what truly matters.
I love even the word, with that silent “n”, lurking shyly until you use the adjective “autumnal”, when it finds its voice to musical effect (the same thing happens when the word “column” becomes “columnist”, although the result is not nearly as elegant).
The American “fall”, which also has a lot to recommend it, especially for poets in search of rhyming words, is a functional affair by comparison, having to double as its own adjective.
But I like fall too. In fact, part of autumn’s attraction is the feeling of letting go: if only of the unrealistic plans you had of summer.
Then, if you’re me, you immediately replace these with unrealistic plans for autumn. Yet again this year, I find myself considering night-classes, in something transformational.
Maybe not the poetry of Baudelaire. Getting back to the subject of firewood, it seems to have had a very depressing effect on him.
Later in his Song of Autumn, he writes this: "All atremble I listen to each falling log;/The building of a scaffold has no duller sound."
Then, warming to the theme, if not the fire, he adds: “It seems to me, lulled by these monotonous shocks,/That somewhere they’re nailing a coffin, in great haste./For whom? - yesterday was summer; here is autumn/That mysterious noise sounds like a departure.”
Poor Baudelaire, he must have known something. A lifetime of poverty, laudanum dependence, and drink had not prepared him for the autumn of life, never mind winter.
He in died aged 46, with ominous timing, on the last day of August.