Here we are suddenly in November, the old age of the year. The world around us is slowing down; daylight hours diminish, the night expands; the crisp fall air turns towards the biting chill of winter. We humans often try to fight this trend: we keep bustling, keep the lights on, rush around doing and seeing things. But we are part of nature, and our circadian rhythms are slowing down with the world around us. While we don’t hibernate like bears or fly south like geese, we too have a natural response to this shift in the seasons: the world around us drives us inward—into our homes and into ourselves.
In this season so naturally disposed to self-examination and contemplation, poetry can be an invaluable aid. We may have to keep “doing” for our jobs, for our families, for our communities, but poetry offers us a brief respite from the frenzy of daily life. Poetry provides a space within which we can close out the business of the world and contemplate the wholeness of things and of our place within that whole. The fruit of such moments is a sense of both time and timelessness, of nature and of eternity, a sense of peace and of “deep delight,” as you’ll find it put in the Robert Penn Warren poem below.
Last month I offered a collection of poems suitable for October, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”; here you’ll find a contemplative set on the lovely melancholy of November, the month of “Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!”
01. From Sunset to Star Rise // Christina Rosetti
Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not:
I am no summer friend, but wintry cold,
A silly sheep benighted from the fold,
A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot.
Read the full poem here.
02. November Night // Adelaide Crapsey
Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts...
Read the full poem here.
03. The Thrush // Edward Thomas
When Winter's ahead,
What can you read in November
That you read in April
When Winter's dead?
Read the full poem here.
04. November for Beginners // Rita Dove
We stack twigs for burning
in glistening patches
but the rain won’t give.
Read the full poem here.
05. Beyond the Red River // Thomas McGrath
The birds have flown their summer skies to the south,
And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass
Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion,
Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves.
Read the full poem here.
06. The Death of Autumn // Edna St. Vincent Millay
When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,
And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind
Like agèd warriors westward, tragic, thinned...
Read the full poem here.
07. After Apple-Picking // Robert Frost
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
Read the full poem here.
08. An Autumn Evening // Lucy Maud Montgomery
Dark hills against a hollow crocus sky
Scarfed with its crimson pennons, and below
The dome of sunset long, hushed valleys lie
Cradling the twilight...
Read the full poem here.
09. Tell Me a Story // Robert Penn Warren
Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.
Read the full poem here.
10. Autumn // Rainer Maria Rilke
The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."
Read the full poem here.
