'We come like croupiers with rakes...'

 The other day I was in the garden raking up leaves – not from the lawn, where the worms take care of them, but from the paths and various corners where they accumulate and turn to slippery mush. It's a job I always rather enjoy, especially in crisp sunny weather, a reminder of the profligate beauty and bounty of nature, and the poignant transience of all things. Each leaf is a marvel, and there they are, in countless profusion, lying all around... 
  My raking of the leaves didn't culminate in a burning. Nobody seems to have bonfires these days – are they illegal or something?  In this meditative poem by the American poet Howard Nemerov – some of whose poems I have previously posted (here, here and here) – he burns the gathered leaves, and the burning brings the poem to a quietly beautiful end. 

Burning the Leaves

This was the first day that the leaves
Came down in hordes, in hosts, a great wealth
Gambled away over the green lawn
Belonging to the house, old fry and spawn
Of the rich year converted into filth
In the beds by the walls, the gutters under the eaves.
We thought of all the generations gone
Like that, flyers, migrants, fugitives.

We come like croupiers with rakes,
To a bamboo clatter drag these winnings in.
Our windfall, firstfruits, tithes, and early dead
Fallen on our holdings from overhead,
And taxable to trees against our sin.
Money to burn! We play for higher stakes
Than the mere leaves, and, burdened with treasure, tread
The orbit of the tree that heaven shakes.

The wrath of God we gather up today, 
But not for long. In the beginning night
We light our hoarded leaves, the flames arise,
The smell of smoke takes memory by surprise,
And we become as children in our sight.
That is, I think, the object of this play,
Though the children dance about our sacrifice
Unthinking, their shadows lengthened and cast away.

(Note the clever rhyme scheme  – abccbaca.)

The picture above is Millais's Autumn Leaves, a marvellously expressive work which Ruskin acclaimed as 'the first instance of a perfectly painted twilight'. It was inspired in part by Millais's memory of raking leaves with Tennyson – a scenario that sounds about as improbable as Wendy Cope's making cocoa for Kingsley Amis.