This has been a beautiful autumn (here in the Southeast at least), with plenty of warmth and mellow sunshine, to say nothing of a prodigious abundance of conkers and just about every other tree fruit.
Here is a fittingly seasonal poem, a well-known and rather beautiful one, by Yeats (of the baleful influence)...
The Wild Swans at CooleThe trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.
The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
Coole Park was in Yeats's day the home of Lady Gregory, who entertained the poet there and assiduously looked after him – so much so that he once said of her, 'I doubt I should have done much with my life but for her firmness and care.' Coole Park is today a nature reserve, part of an important wetland system, but its literary associations remain in evidence, and the Autograph Tree – a Copper Beech on which Lady Gregory's literary guests carved their initials – still stands. To judge by the photograph below, one George Bernard Shaw was especially determined to make his mark. No surprise there.
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