Last month, I shared with you summer-themed poetry and suggested you study its descriptive paragraphs, sentences and phrases and apply what you learned to your own writing.
The seasons have shifted now from summer to fall. Think about the ambiance words create in these autumn poems and compare them to the mood of summer poetry.
In her “November Night”, American poet, Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914) invokes a powerful image using less than twenty words. What does your mind “see” when you read her poem?
November Night
Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.
Notice how the English poet and aesthetic philosopher, T.E. Hulme (1883–1917), uses similes to create a word picture in his short poem, “Autumn”.
Autumn
A touch of cold in the Autumn night –
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
Now, compare the mood of the English poet Rainer Maria Rilke‘s poem “Autumn” to Hulme’s. Rilke (1875–1926) was a master at weaving word pictures with existential thoughts.
Autumn
The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”
And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.
We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It’s in them all.
And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.
Three poets: Crapsey, Hulme and Rilke, all living in the same era, writing about the same theme, using words to create significantly different images. Use what you’ve learned reading their words to supercharge your own writing—
Start right now by writing
your own autumn-themed descriptive
paragraph or poem.
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