Autumn Wonder

This time of the year is Big Frank’s favorite. The beautiful colors of the leaves, the harvest, the palpable feel of change, the chilling night air, all the memories that fall brings, etc. etc. It is an apt time for wonder. And it is, not surprisingly, a topic that has been written about voluminously by poets. It is interesting to note the common themes that accompany poetry on autumn: loss, melancholy, change, harvest, and the beauty of the changing leaves. Robert Frost’s well-known poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” well captures the melancholy change of autumn. It accents the inevitability of change and the ephemeral nature of life. This is the predominant take of poets. However, there are still quite a few who accent the ripening, colorful, joyful time of autumn (see "Merry Autumn" by Paul Laurence Dunbar). Richard Wilbur has written an amazing poem that balances all the above to an extraordinary way. His title, “The Beautiful Changes”, sums up the poem very well. It starts with an autumn scene and shows how the change of the season makes the scenes more beautiful. Then it moves to the person in that scene and by analogy shows how that person’s memory of someone “valleys” his mind in “fabulous blue”. The beautiful changes: here “changes” is not only a noun, but a verb as well. The beauty that surrounds you, that you live through changes you too. You absorb like a chameleon. What loss there is a kind one and takes you “back to wonder.”

The Beautiful Changes
by Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

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Finally, the greatest version of the greatest autumn song, "Autumn Leaves", from Cannonball Adderely's album "Somethin' Else". Performed by Cannonball Adderely, Miles Davis, Hank Jones, Art Blakey, and Sam Jones. This song pulls all the disparate feelings of autumn together in breathtakingly beautiful way.