Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
- Emily Brontë
I watch leaves swirling from a tree’s branches, falling to the earth, their movement stopping me in my tracks and making my heart lurch. The changing seasons have been inspiring writers for centuries and no more so than Autumn or the Fall, which has been captured in all its poignancy and potency in the pages of literature. Autumn, the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, as Keats wrote.
There is something purposeful about the beginning of Autumn, with its back to school, new term, new pencil case, new Prime Minister vibe. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall” declared F Scott Fitzgerald. Yet there is a sadness, too, at the coming year’s end, at the passing of Spring and Summer - and many passages of literature are infused with melancholy.
Writing about the seasons is a wonderful way of feeling time, becoming grounded in time and place, crucial skills of any writer. It’s also a great exercise in observation and being sensitive to change – the seasons are a gift to the nature writer and the next masterclass in my nature writing series Writing the seasons will inspire participants to attune the eyes, ears and pen to the beauty of nature in autumn both in cities and the countryside, to the season which brings such a feast for the senses and fuel for creativity. “Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonise”, declared George Eliot.
Autumn has inspired writers throughout the ages to some of their finest words, with the glory of its colours, the smell of roasting chestnuts, the pleasure of crunching through leaves during an autumnal walk. How glorious it is to go on an autumn walk as the world turns colour, a welcome respite in a turbulent world. The great outdoors and the natural world in Autumn is celebrated in much of the literature about the season. “I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all daylight hours in the open air,” said Nathaniel Hawthorne. And what bounties writers have discovered outdoors. As Wordsworth wrote: “Wild is the music of the autumnal winds amongst the faded woods.”
A love of leaves of course leaves its mark – all sizes and shapes and colours pirouette through the pages of books: “And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves…”, mused Virginia Woolf. It’s a season beloved in writing for all ages: “It’s the first day of autumn! A time of hot chocolatey mornings, and toasty marshmallow evenings, and best of all, leaping into leaves!”, declared Winnie the Pooh in Pooh’s Grand Adventure.
In some passages we see the writer becoming nature. “Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the Earth seeking the successive autumns”, wrote George Eliot. If I were a bird…imagining ourselves into the perspective of wildlife and elements of the natural world is also a great technique for the writer, an exercise in empathy, in the virtues of gaining a birds’ eye perspective. I also love a line from the poet Rumi - “Be like a tree, let the dead leaves drop.” Be like a tree – yes.
Autumn can make us feel a whole palette of emotions. Of course, it’s a season of endings: “Autumn shows us how beautiful it is to let things go” – unknown. A season of loss and letting go, it’s also a season of reaping, of plenitude and the bounty of harvest. There can also be - with the impact the climate crisis is having on the weather and seasons - an underlying anxiety; the first leaf I saw fallen and bronzed this year was in the summertime still, a hint of the autumn to come, a sign too of seasons somewhat in disarray.
As we get deeper into the season and all those leaves have fallen, some writers show themselves weary of autumn, almost ready for the next season: “A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.” – ee cummings.
Whatever your feelings about the Fall, it’s a great season to try and get down onto the blank page. As Wallace Stegner put it: “Another fall, another turned page.”
It’s good to remember that Autumn is a season for planting bulbs, for putting potential new life into the soil before it frosts over, it feels like seeding hope – something to look forward to when a long hard winter bites, that the leaves will grow again.
Anita Sethi is a nature writer, award-winning author of I Belong Here – A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain. Her online masterclass Writing the seasons: Nature writing for autumn takes place on Thursday 22 September 2022, 6.30pm-8.30pm BST
