Something For A Mid October Weekend

As it's Friday, to end the working week here's a few offerings to take us into a mid October Autumn weekend..........

Nature's palette at this time of year is staggeringly beautiful,

Oranges, browns, yellows, greens and deep reds- 

All these colours scatter across the earth warming and delighting the eyes and I am thankful to God and appreciate how lucky I am to experience the beauty of the earth for another year.

 

The wonderful Ralph Richardson in an interview with Russell Harty, wherein he reflects on the autumn of his years and recites Keats poem Ode to Autumn.

 Ode to Autumn John Keats


Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

In a letter written to  his friend Reynolds from Winchester, in September, 1819, Keats says: 'How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies--I never liked stubble-fields so much as now--Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble-field looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.' What he composed was the Ode To Autumn.

Another fine poem ......................

The Exam by Joyce Sutphen

It is mid-October. The trees are in

their autumnal glory (red, yellow-green,

orange) outside the classroom where students

take the mid-term, sniffling softly as if

identifying lines from Blake or Keats

was such sweet sorrow, summoned up in words

they never saw before. I am thinking

of my parents, of the six decades they’ve

been together, of the thirty thousand

meals they’ve eaten in the kitchen, of the

more than twenty thousand nights they’ve slept

under the same roof. I am wondering

who could have fashioned the test that would have

predicted this success? Who could have known?

Poem copyright ©2010 by Joyce Sutphen, whose most recent book of poetry is First Words, Red Dragonfly Press, 2010. Poem reprinted by permission of Joyce Sutphen at Poetry Foundation


Finally Beautiful Things by Gungor sung by Relevant Band and a charming story within the video.