Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
- “To Autumn” by John Keats
Quote of the Week
“There is a real affinity between his Faerie Queene, a poem of quests and wanderings and inextinguishable desires, and Ireland itself – the soft, wet air, the loneliness, the muffled shapes of the hills, the heart-rending sunsets. It was of course a different Ireland from ours, an Ireland without potatoes, whitewashed cottages, or bottled stout; it must already have been ‘the land of longing’. The Faerie Queene should perhaps be regarded as the work of one who is turning into an Irishman. For Ireland shares with China the power of assimilating all her invaders. It is an old complaint that all who go there – Danes, Normans, English, Scotch, very Firbolgs – rapidly become ‘more Irish than Irish themselves’. With Spenser the process was perhaps beginning. It is he hated the Irish and they him; but, as an Irishman myself, I take leave to doubt whether that is a very un-Irish trait. (‘The Irish, sir,’ said Dr Johnson, ‘are an honest people. They never speak well of one another.’) – C.S. Lewis, “Edmund Spenser, 1552-99”
In pursuit of researching the potential Spenser essay project for the Scrapbook – I’ve actually moved on to doing Book I of The Faerie Queene as my potential target, I think – I’ve reread Lewis’ essays on Spenser, and found this brilliant, rather two-note quote.
Lewis is, of course, in part, trying to reconcile the evidently gentle nature of Spenser and the richness of his imagination with his participation – not one-sided, the Irish killed his baby son – in a bloody, wicked time. He is also, I think, recognizing a real development in Spenser – he has drawn strong evidence from Colin Clouts Comes Home Againe amongst other pieces, of a shift of Spenser’s idea of home being England to home being Ireland. Spenser is obviously enchanted, as Lewis was, by the Irish landscape, and by the inner magic; though Lewis restricts this to Ireland, I think it is a feature of the British Isles as a whole, these mist-wreathed, soft lands, washed by a maternal sea, changing bloody-handed invaders into gentle nobbly-faced hobbits. (I touched on this last week in the music discussion, citing Orwell.)
Aside from this keen (and moving) insight, it’s also just quite a funny “bit” from Lewis, and that alone justifies inclusion.
Autumn
Keats is the third poet to gain a second number of this periodical (after Eliot and Clare), and reflecting on his To Autumn – though perhaps a little quotidian for some – was inevitable. It is one of his finest poems, and is a vivid, imaginatively and emotionally powerful, rich in natural imagery – it is, in a word, what you expect of “Romanticism”, at the level of commonplace.
Keats gives us the positive side of autumn here – more on which shortly – but I confess I find it a bittersweet and melancholy time. The great residuals of harvest that continue to the start of October are glorious, yes – we have the second crop of raspberries coming through in the forage patch now, and plenty of growing Scarlet Runner Beans (though a startlingly early light frost has already hit, and I don’t know if the plants will recover), and a few strawberries – and the last of our tiny tomato crop, down from many dozens to about 10 this year! The weather has been so dreadful as to really render a lot of staples moot (the first raspberry forage crop was late and tiny; our main crop potatoes and tomatoes were both more or less finished by a cold snap in August, leaving very anaemic returns), though there have been a few small compensations – a very rich forage blackberry harvest, for they are plants which do not mind extended cool and wet weather; reasonable broad bean and early potato harvests, as they were finishing off in the one really good patch of the summer.
Yet – after a very cold winter, and a wet and grey summer, heading into what has some signs of a cold autumn – it is hard not to look with foreboding at the sudden redness in the west each evening, dropping at an angle into our south-facing living room and bedroom which cuts with fading light straight to the east wall, golden blood streaming with less force each minute as the day dies. Winter has the honesty of just being cold – sometimes gloriously and enjoyably cold – and there can be snow, and it is quiet at the allotment, and soon spring will come. Autumn is a dying time, as the berries go flyblown and the leaves on the gentler plants shrivel.
But we have a warm week predicted ahead, and day will come again –
(An excuse for a Tolkien diversion: “Last of all Hurin stood alone. Then he cast aside his shield, and wielded an axe two-handed; and it is sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll-guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time that he slew Hurin cried: 'Aure entuluva! Day shall come again!' Seventy times he uttered that cry; but they took him at last alive...” Nonetheless, day does come again, in part due to Hurin’s faith and hope.) –
and we are well to the wise if we refuse the trick of despair that the falling leaves attempt upon us. Keats gives us the other side.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
This close cousin to the Keatsian Ode (see “30 – Beauty”) starts with the quatrain and then uses a septet (ABCBAAC). Keats is at his most voluptuous here – no love lyric of his is more sensually rich – the loaded vines, the bending apples, filled ripe fruit, swollen gourds and plump sweet hazels, flooding honeycombs. We meet our frost-bannered autumns, and we meet our endless summers; the year I turned 29 or 30, I do not quite remember, autumn only seemed to arrive on my birthday at the start of November. We arrived at Beamish in sun and left in freezing rain. Each shortening day beforehand seemed more desperate than the last to fill its quota of sunny glory. What at the worst turns to ignoble rot can be captured as rich sweetness, the dashing light filling out the nut’s meat and turning acids to sugars. Even now I some days see bees amongst the lemon balm in our yard, supping that marvellous plant.
(I am encouraging it to colonise waste areas of our allotment, because it copes with the nitrogenous soils in the chicken area, is not eaten by the hens, does not sting like nettles and is not toxic like hogweed, and in fact smells gorgeous.)
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Perhaps Keats’ most magical stanza, in every sense. Suddenly Autumn is personified, almost like the Ghost of Christmas Present; a sun-gloried and Jovial figure, a giant in the field and orchard. Look at this depiction of the delicate mix of death and joy that comes by harvest: we all know the passage of the “winnowing wind” through the trees, and we know the twined flowers that seem to hold out impossibly against the creeping cold, and we know the turning of fruit to pleasure, in apple tarts and at the “cyder-press” and in blackberry crumbles and as the red and black fruits are all boiled down for jam…the smells insinuate under the kitchen door, and we see the evidence of the apple peel in the compost caddy. The cool-bright autumn day, cool enough to cool the muscles as we fork up the last potatoes, the chiaroscuro lighting us in the short afternoons as we press beans into the cooling soil – for the seed must fall to the ground and die. (I – briefly – pity those otherwise blessed to live on the equable Equator – no Brazilian latifundium porch or Balinese beach has ever known the musical changeability of our axial weather here.)
I recall an Adrian Bell story that deeply impacted me – of his first experience of harvest, harvest by hand still, in the ‘20s – and he never gave up harvest by hand, correctly seeing machinery as a vicious debt trap for most family farmers. This first time, he led the men across the field from dawn, cutting the crop to windrows. They worked all day, and as evening fell, their wives and children came up to the field with dinner. There was a beer cask (a cider cask would do as well, of course). They drank and ate and celebrated as the sun fell across the golden sustenance on the ground, the old bloody Samhain rites turned to a gentle and bounteous King of the Harvest.
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Every season has a music and a garland, and there is not only no use wishing for some other season, but you make great loss thereby. The gnats and lambs and crickets and robins and swallows sing each their separate part in perfect polyphony. You must not ask for Handel when it is time for Bach; you must not sing “Home Sweet Home” on the battleline, where drum and pipe call the tune, though you must certainly sing it round the campfire.
There is time yet for another day or two at the cricket, and for sunlit softball with the children, and for sowing seeds on bright days, and gathering the last gems this year from nature’s jewelbox.
Three Musketeers: Dartagnan (2023), d. Martin Bourbolon
This is the first part of two, and excellent. I read The Three Musketeers last year for the first time – and was wholly captivated – and this is both a faithful and intelligent adaptation. My one criticism – to say it up front – is that it is shot a little darkly at times, dressed at times a little muddily. One might quibble with one or two of the changes – the comical triple duel ends here not with a bloody skirmish with a body of bravos, but an organised assassination attempt on Athos by some thirty or so Cardinal’s men; the closing action scene is frankly a little silly, and not at all related to the text; Porthos’ suggested but not demonstrated bisexuality stretches credulity in the France of Louis XIII, and it is clearly a politic replacement for his outrageous confidence scams on unhappy wives; this is, for what it’s worth, mirrored in the total removal of the “Dartagnan seduces Milady” plot, which frankly sticks out badly in the original too – but generally there is enough panache in the more questionable choices to get us through.
Though my comment as to some “muddying up” stands, this is generally a beautiful film – beautifully shot on the whole, brilliant costumery, wonderful scenes at court. The acting is top notch, though the only name familiar to our Anglophone ears is that of Eva Green, playing Milady – and perhaps Vincent Cassel, a soulful Athos. Francois Civil is a perfectly charming Dartagnan, opposite an ingenuous and sweet Constance Bonacieux played by Lyna Khoudri (no sign of M. Bonacieux – plainly this is for the cleansing of Constance’s reputation rather than out of any discomfort with adultery, given various other key aspects of the plot!).
The actual find, for me, is Louis Garrel as Louis XIII. The book has a subtle depiction of both the King and the Cardinal – and though the Cardinal is, I think, as cheaply scripted here (if subtly played by Eric Ruf) as he usually is, the King is simultaneously noble, just, effeminate, pitiable, unjustly treated – this is partly the script, yes, but Garrel is able to depict the vulnerability of a mistreated man, and the cruel lashing out of a weak man, and the resolve of a weak, mistreated man who nonetheless desires to do good (and does good, when he can).
Very fine, and I look forward to watching Milady.