2019 (Page 8)

Twitterで好きなアカウントのひとつが”Literature Interest” たぶん英国の人（会社）のサイト。時々しかツイートはないけど珠玉のツイートがある。そのうちのひとつが季節の詩。

August 28, 2019 3:00 pm

This is the latest in our monthly posts celebrating some of the best poems about each of the months of the year. This time, of course, it’s September’s turn: that point where summer may still linger on, but autumn is beginning to rear its head. The harvest is being gathered, and that ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ is upon us, in John Keats’s immortal words. Here’s our pick of the best poems about the month of September.

William Wordsworth, ‘September, 1819’. ‘Departing summer hath assumed / An aspect tenderly illumed, / The gentlest look of spring; / That calls from yonder leafy shade / Unfaded, yet prepared to fade, / A timely carolling.’ So begins this Romantic meditation on the arrival of autumn, in which Wordsworth detects an echo of spring in the mellowing nature of everything.

Helen Hunt Jackson, ‘September’. Jackson (1830-85) was an exact contemporary of Emily Dickinson – she was born the same year and died just one year before her more famous fellow American poet – but she’s far less well-known. As well as being a poet, Jackson was also a novelist as well as an activist who campaigned on behalf of Native Americans. Her Calendar of Sonnetsoffered a sonnet for every month of the year, accompanied by related illustrations. In ‘September’, however, Jackson writes not a sonnet but a poem of quatrains, in which she muses upon ‘the secret / Which makes September fair.’

W. B. Yeats, ‘September 1913’. A slightly different meditation on September, this, from arguably Ireland’s most famous poet, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). Meditating on the situation in Ireland in September 1913, Yeats laments a lost past for his home country, concluding that ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.’

Lucy Maud Montgomery, ‘September’. Montgomery (1874-1942) is best-known for her classic novel for children, Anne of Green Gables, set in Montgomery’s own country of Canada (on Prince Edward Island). But Montgomery was also a poet, and in this short poem about September she pays tribute to the ‘late delight / Atoning in its splendor for the flight / Of summer blooms and joys – / This is September.’

Sara Teasdale, ‘September Midnight’. Listening to the chirruping and clicking insects at midnight on a warm late summer’s night – for this is an ‘Indian Summer’, and the warm summer weather has lasted into early autumn – Teasdale (1884-1933) hopes to remember the ‘voices’ of the little insects as summer fades: ‘Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer, / Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing, / Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects, / Ceaseless, insistent.’

Geoffrey Hill, ‘September Song’. Another different take on September: beginning with the birth and death dates of a child who, we are told, was ‘deported’ in September 1942, ‘September Song’ addresses one of the most difficult subjects for a poet to write about: the Holocaust. As we read on, we realise that ‘deported’ is a military euphemism, and the child was in fact killed in 1942, aged just ten years old, presumably in one of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The reference to September ‘fatten[ing] on vines’ draws upon the natural imagery of early autumn to reflect on the horrors and atrocities of the Second World War.