Song at the Beginning of Autumn
Now watch this Autumn that arrives
In smells. All looks like Summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.
Proust who collected time within
A child’s cake would understand
The ambiguity of this –
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that Autumn gropes for us.
But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia. We give names –
Autumn and Summer, Winter, Spring –
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.
But I am carried back against
My will into a childhood where
Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke;
I lean against my window fenced
From evocations in the air.
When I said Autumn, Autumn broke.
This is an early poem by Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001), first published in her 1955 collection, A Way of Looking and reprinted in The Collected Poems edited by Emma Mason. A lifelong, practising Catholic, Jennings is usually described as a religious, or Christian, poet. Mason doesn’t contest such description, but her argument for “a more complex poet than critics have previously acknowledged” is justified by the range of preoccupations emerging in this substantial volume.
Jennings was often interested in tracking moments of intense personal perception for their own sake. If that approach forms part of a larger quest as a religious poet seeking transcendence, she doesn’t make transcendence an issue. While her technique remains thoroughly traditional, her interest in locating mental events or sensations outside, and resistant to, the realist spectrum sometimes brings her imaginatively close to today’s experimental writers. Despite the constraints, she visits some of the still-unexplored corners of the self-searcher.
Her rural childhood in Boston, Lincolnshire ended when she was six, too soon to make a note-taking naturalist of her. But, as Song at the Beginning of Autumn demonstrates, it fine-tuned her senses to the natural world. Has autumn begun, she asks herself before starting her “song”, knowing the answer isn’t in anything visible, but is something she has sniffed in the air. Nothing has changed in the view, thus far, but her challenge, “Now watch this Autumn that arrives / In smells”, confidently predicts that we will shortly catch up with her perception, and see the change.
The first stanza is impressionistic, evoking in representative summer colours, green foliage and white flowers, or clouds. The last two lines are packed full of alliterative, root-sharing words, almost too many. I wasn’t sure at first about the phrase “flowers flourish” but the effect seems worth the risk. Jennings is painting thickly here, reproducing the textures of deep grasses and, as well as clouds, crowds of tall, late-summer flowers – meadow-sweet and cow-parsley, perhaps. It’s important that the flowers aren’t identified. The poem is partly an engagement with a young child’s perception. A lot of the world is still non-verbal.
Jennings was an archivist of early childhood memories throughout her career. And this is where her quirky reference in the next stanza to Marcel Proust’s “madeleine moment” will be taking her. The idea of memories as time compressed in a small, physical object (“A child’s cake”) clearly appeals to Jennings’s own sense of access to lost time. But, first, she reveals the new season in the image of the “thin / Column of smoke” that “stirs from the land / Proving that Autumn gropes for us”. This last line is a wonderfully scary addition; gracefully, it tips the poem for a moment into menace.
The third stanza interestingly reconstructs the concept of the seasons. The names make them safe as big, simple, reassuringly different spans of time that externalise human moods and “unfasten” them from the psyche. These may be potentially difficult moods, better removed to the wider environment. Each season is viewed positively, too, as a hoard of valuable poetic and human emotion (“rich nostalgia”). An Autumn that manifests itself only by the thin column of smoke may be dangerous because still unformed and borderline.
Continuing the Proustian theme, autumn provokes involuntary memory. Does Jennings give this a particular, negative cast in her phrase “against my will”? “Bonfires” may be associated with fireworks, spelling fear as well as fun. “Marbles” could suggest an indoors game, or a game that was previously played outdoors being relocated because of colder weather. The source of the smoke perhaps changes, from bonfires to fires lit in the house. The loss of summer freedoms, or childhood itself, may be the autumnal subtext that the adult speaker indistinctly recalls.
Another powerful last line, this time ending the poem, “When I said Autumn, Autumn broke”, reminds me of the magic we sometimes childishly attach to spoken language: saying something aloud to bring it into existence. The speaker “said Autumn” in response to something she already knew subliminally, perhaps, as the child picks up the quarrel behind the adults’ silence, or the farmer tastes in the early morning air some far-off meteorological change. But saying the word has made all the difference for the poet: autumn has occurred in her consciousness. The final verb, “broke”, suggests bad weather. Read an expulsion from Eden there, too, if you will.
Jennings keeps effortlessly and consistently to her ABCABC rhyme scheme, the tetrameter lines forming a prosodic window-frame that doesn’t stop the window variously opening – on to bright high summer, the smoky scent of autumn, intimations of time past. Perhaps at the end there’s a wish for the window to be securely shut.
