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Posts Tagged "Hal Borland":

Time for the Burning of the Leaves?


Now we have reached October, most of us feel two conflicting moods about this season of mist and mellow fruitfulness. You can be like Jeremiah 8.20 and say: The harvest is past, the summer is ended and we are not saved or you can glory in the beauty of the season and feel re-invigorated by the beginning of the new year – in education, fashion, politics and, from next month, the Christian calendar. First, though, it is out with the old in:  Laurence Binyon, ‘The Burning of the Leaves’ :

Now is the time for the burning of the leaves,
They go to the fire; the nostrils prick with smoke
Wandering slowly into the weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin, and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.
The last hollyhock´s fallen tower is dust:
All the spices of June are a bitter reek…
All burns! the reddest rose is a ghost.
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.
Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,…
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there:
Let them go to the fire with never a look behind…
They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour…
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

 

For Binyon, as for our next writer, autumn is a time for spiritual spring-cleaning. They saw stripping the spirit bare as a necessary part of the cycle of life, but found it impossible to mourn the death of summer without simultaneously exulting in the coming rebirth of spring. Whereas Binyon draws no conclusion about a divine purpose to this cycle, John Masefield in The Everlasting Mercy is exhilarated by his vision of being purified and renewed by Christ:

O Christ who holds the open gate,
O Christ who drives the furrow straight,
O Christ, the plough, O Christ, the laughter
Of holy white birds flying after.
Lo, all my heart’s field red and torn,
And Thou wilt bring the young green corn,
The young green corn divinely springing,
The young green corn forever singing;
And when the field is fresh and fair
Thy blessèd feet shall glitter there,
And we will walk the weeded field,
And tell the golden harvest’s yield,
The corn that makes the holy bread
By which the soul of man is fed,
The holy bread, the food unpriced,
Thy everlasting mercy, Christ.

 

Edwin Way Teale, in  ‘Autumn Across America’, ponders the cosmic dance of the seasons:

Thinking of autumn and spring in the same breath, as opposite sides of the wheel of creation, we remember that whereas ‘for man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together, for nature it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.’ And sowing and scattering abroad is of course what mankind does in spring. The wheel keeps turning. Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was, is not, and never again will be; what is, is change.

For the Bible tells us so: Genesis 8:22
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease

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