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Friday, October 1, 2021

To October

It's the first day of a new month, "the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," a phrase that has stayed with me since I read Keats' "To Autumn" in high school. 

What I don't remember are the later phrases, these sumptuous descriptions: "close-bosom friend of the maturing sun" or "to bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees" or these lines from the final stanza: 

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.

I've nothing to add to that!