Autumn Reverie

When I went to elementary school, many years ago, we were taught to appreciate poetry by memorizing it. Not a bad idea for today as well. Oh, I know that in educational circles today, memorization of any sort is treated as well as a leper on a hot day. Well, that’s too bad because most of our great poetic literature has come down to us in this way. Beowulf, for example, was memorized by scops, singers who recited epic poetry for the entertainment and enlightenment of their communities and who found it easier to memorize a long epic if they added alliteration and rhyme. If you’re singing a song or taking a part in a play, you have to memorize the lyrics or the lines. So what’s the big deal? I know that schooling in the nineteenth century was done primarily by repetition, sometimes with a number of recitations all going on at once, hence the name “blab” schools. I am not advocating a return to that. Just the use of memorization every once and a while to add enrichment to individual memory.

But I digress. One of the poems I had to memorize was by Bliss Carmen, a Canadian poet, called “A Vagabond Song.” I still love that poem. Whenever I see the trees beginning to turn color in the beginning of the fall, the lines of that poem come into my mind. I am posting the poem below to share it with you.

I am so glad I was made to memorize this poem so very many years ago. Maybe you would like to memorize it as well. Or, for that matter, the poem I wrote below it. No? Well, maybe another time.

A Vagabond Song
Bliss Carmen

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood –
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

And the scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like smoke upon the hills.

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.



Autumn Reverie
Christopher Bogart

It is a time
When the air becomes
Crisp and cool,
And the sky turns
A deepened blue.
Clouds gleam
In kind clear rays –
Bright white light,
And a faint smell
Of sweet, crisp apples
Tints the air…

It is this time
That I look to green leaves,
Dancing to the wind’s tune,
And see the possibility
Of orange,
Flame red,
And russet yellow
Tint their terpsichore.

My bones chill,
And my mind awakens
To a spirit new,
Gliding on that wind,
And turning to me
As if to beckon
That I follow its chase…
Its race
To the setting sun.