mellow fruitfulness
In 1919 the Dutch scholar Johan
Huizinga published a highly influential “crossover” work of medieval history
entitled Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen—better
known to the world at large through two translations of 1924, Herbst
des Mittelalters in German and The Waning of the Middle Ages in
English. Seventy years later a new
English edition appeared, this time entitled The Autumn of the Middle Ages.
With Huizinga’s famous book clearly in mind the Dutch-born theologian
and historian Heiko Oberman, who spent much of his important career in this
country, in 1963 published a book about a late medieval theologian (Gabriel
Biel) entitled The Harvest of Medieval
Theology.
You don’t need to be a serious
Germanic philologist to note that the Dutch Herfst
and the German Herbst (the common
terms for the fall season) must be kissing kin of English harvest. So they are. They are Germanic equivalents of Latin autumnus—another word we also use in an
English form. I raise the matter of the
book’s first and still by far best-known translation not out of pedantry but
because it captures the ambiguity of the season, of this essay, and of my
mood. Is autumn a waning or a waxing, a
depletion or is it an abundance? Huizinga’s
book seems to deal at once with phenomena of cultural decadence and of
exhaustion on the one hand, and on the other to point to new attitudes and thought patterns we usually think
of as belonging to the “Renaissance.”
I had occasion to ponder certain
ambiguities of the calendrical season during this past week of perfect Indian
Summer. It has been almost
supernaturally clear, crisp, and calm, with several days cloudless. Yet the days are shortening perceptibly, and
the foliage has withered on the grapevines, almost as if by command. The mellowness of plenitude presages the
inevitable morbidity of the approaching winter.
Many poets have written about
seasonal change, and written about it well.
But I find myself each year returning with mixed pleasure and plangency
to Keats’ ode “To Autumn”. It’s only about thirty lines long, but, his own achievement,
and English poetry as a whole, would not be the same without it. Keats probably wrote this masterpiece in the
last week of September, 1819—that is, almost exactly two centuries ago. This is an inference to be drawn from a
letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds in which he comments on the mellow
beauty of stubble fields, an image also prominent in the poem. He was staying briefly in Winchester enjoying
what in retrospect would prove to be his final days of good health.
Though I praise the poem so highly,
many students find it hard going. A
two-hundred-year-old poem is likely to exhibit a few distracting conventions
and some poetic diction, thees and thous and so forth, uncongenial to a
contemporary reader. But an important
purpose of education is to combat provinciality, including that historical
provinciality so brazen in our culture, and such an ironic feature of academic
“multiculturists”. The central image of
Keats’s poem is the personified season, a rustic laborer “sitting careless on a
granary floor” with “hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind / Or on a
half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, / Drowsed with the fume of poppies…” combining
the abundance of harvest with the narcotic somnolence of a prospective
hibernation. I have always taken this
personification as feminine, but my wife Joan, who demurs, drew me up short by pointing
out to me there is no textual certainty of this conclusion, and some linguistic
and sociological counter-indication pushes against it. Latin Autumnus is usually masculine, sometimes neuter; male agricultural
workers can have long hair and probably usually do. So perhaps androgyny is a conscious artistic aim. In any event, as people age—at least if I can
judge by my own experience and that of contemporaries—the advent of autumn
becomes ever more portentous and solemn.
The relation of the year cycle and the life cycle, always just below the
surface, becomes obvious and articulate.
Two weeks past I learned of the death of one of my oldest friends, a man
I met as a fellow college freshman in 1954, a date that will seem practically
prehistoric to the vast majority of the world’s residents today. Keats was living at his own historical cusp,
but he still lived in a primarily agricultural world. He had seen real reapers, and he knew, as we
hardly can, the intimate relationship between his daily bread and the
threshing-floor in the granary.
So much of what separates us from
our vanished past is of recent invention, especially electrification and the
vast increases of mechanical power. We
have to the greatest degree possible cast aside as encumbering restraints of the
diurnal and seasonal distinctions for which the human race was trained by long
millennia of evolution. Your recent
ancestors “went to bed with the chickens,” as the saying was, that is, when it
got dark. There was no easy artificial
way to erase the distinction between night and day, or to defeat the heat and
humidity of summer or the chill of winter.
Above all, human life was in many ways linked to the larger
patterns of the agricultural cycle. In
visual terms this connection is often beautifully illustrated in the old
calendars, with their “labors of the months”—as well, of course, as in an
entire season called “the harvest”. But
the germination of grain, the staff of life, involved its own paradox, and one
that brings together the most elementary forces of life and death. “Truly, truly, I say
to you” says Jesus, "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and
October, from the Très riches heures of the Duc de Berry
dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)
He is there speaking in a mysterious way of his own proximate death, and
of all human death for that matter. I
shall not presume to interpret mysteries except to acknowledge that human life,
if allowed to run what we usually call its “natural” course, will arrive at its
ambiguous autumn, a time both of waning and of harvest. Keats—though his own life was just about to
be cut off so prematurely—heard a special dignity in autumnal “music” when
compared with the upbeat “songs of Spring.”
As he looked out over the rose-tinted stubble field from which the fruit
had been gathered and safely stored against the dearth of winter, he listened. “Then in a willful choir the small gnats
mourn / Among the river sallows, borne aloft
/ Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies…”
