John Keats and Amy Lowell, Day Two: Yellow, Yellow, Yellow

To keep the comparison in mind, here again are both poems from yesterday:

To Autumn

by John Keats (1795-1821)

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,   

Drowsed 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 cider-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 redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,     

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

   

Autumn  

by Amy Lowell (1874 – 1925)

They brought me a quilled, yellow dahlia, Opulent, flaunting.

Round gold

Flung out of a pale green stalk.

Round, ripe gold

Of maturity,

Meticulously frilled and flaming,

A fire-ball of proclamation:

Fecundity decked in staring yellow

For all the world to see.

They brought a quilled, yellow dahlia,

To me who am barren

Shall I send it to you,

You who have taken with you

All I once possessed?

  

So Amy Lowell’s “Autumn” is at the other end of the spectrum from Keats. I’ll begin by mentioning that I don’t know who Lowell's “They” might be, and I wonder briefly if the poem should make that clear. But by then, the scene has made me understand that the “round gold/ Flung out of a pale green stalk”--“frilled,” “flaming” and fecund--brings hurt and rage to a woman who sees herself as the empty opposite of female fertility and beauty. 

Surely we have all known autumn days, or entire seasons, that seemed offensive, an intrusion of golden glory,

when our day or season was grey, full of sterile, hollow routine, or was downright sad, as in actual grieving. And just as we were deciding we could cope with all that, some rosy-cheeked, Halloween-loving, cheerleader type comes along, sticks a pom-pom in our face, and demands we say rah-rah for the pretty leaves.

So, with Amy Lowell, we say to the amber season and to Them That Brought It Whoever They Are, take your yellow ball and go down the road. How dare you plop that thing on my table, you with your calm  guarantee of death just around the bend.

Can a season be an affront, feel like a personal insult, a mockery of who and what we are? There’s not a doubt in my mind.

I hear you, Amy Lowell. I still hear Keats, but for me there’s a new kid on the block. Her story isn’t gorgeous like young Keats’; after all, he was gorgeous about most things. In fact, Lowell presents The Boldly Anti-Gorgeous. It hates all that luxuriating, in love with itself and everything, converting earth to a sumptuous woman, the breeze in her hair, sitting in hippie contemplation over there on the granary floor. 

Lowell’s flinty argument is as plausible as Keats’ adoration, and I’m listening to both.  

Again, I hope visitors will talk about which poem, or which parts of poems, they like more, as opposed to what they admire more in terms of poetic achievement. The experiment is skewed by the different times and circumstances of the two poets. But we're not going for world peace here; we're just saying what we like and what we admire, recognizing that there might be a difference.  Sometimes I think of the incredible skill I see in some musicians, yet the actual music they produce can be, to me, little more than a frantic tangle of notes.

*

John Keats, "To Autumn," and Amy Lowell "Autumn," Part One

To Autumn

by John Keats (1795-1821)

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,   

Drowsed 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 cider-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 redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,     

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

 

Keats’ “To Autumn” is about as famous as a poem can get, and deservedly so, especially for the sumptuousness of its imagery and the way it reiterates Shakespeare’s theme in the sonnet last week:  “To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Like everything, however, perfect language is only a virgin once.  No matter how much I enjoy and admire the poem’s focus on sensuous details, fleeting fullness in autumn’s plants and animals as they’re about to leave us, no matter how often that poem and I have gone warmly to bed together, no matter how gracefully it has declined to preach tidy morals, even as closure, the fact is, we’ve been there many times. 
  
So as I browsed for additional autumn poems, look what jumped out at me.  Amy Lowell’s “Autumn” isn’t necessarily a better poem than Keats’ “To Autumn,” but the force of its bold, boastful yellow, its “fire-ball” of a dahlia and the insult of that fertility as it’s presented to a “barren” and now furious, hurt woman—all that creates another, legitimate image of what autumn can mean.  Compared to the familiar beauty of Keats’ season, Lowell’s portrait of autumn as a wound has a fierce vigor that slaps me awake.

Autumn   by Amy Lowell

They brought me a quilled, yellow dahlia, Opulent, flaunting.

Round gold

Flung out of a pale green stalk.

Round, ripe gold

Of maturity,

Meticulously frilled and flaming,

A fire-ball of proclamation:

Fecundity decked in staring yellow

For all the world to see.

They brought a quilled, yellow dahlia,

To me who am barren

Shall I send it to you,

You who have taken with you

All I once possessed?

Keats’ speaker regards autumn as a filling of things that promises the passing of things; he bestows upon it dignity, elegance and admiration. He doesn’t find autumn cute or cause for a sappy greeting card, the way so many of us do. But as I hear Keats’ ode, he’s much more observant of the luxuriant plenty of what's gorgeous, the climax and afterglow, than the darker fact of its mortality.

That’s more than enough for one day. Part Two will come in a day or two, with more emphasis on Amy Lowell’s poem.