Mists, Mellow Fruitfulness, and the March to Winter

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

John Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” may well be a charming little tribute to the season’s so-called beauty and bounty. His “mists and mellow fruitfulness” certainly make for lovely poetic fodder. Yet, the mist draping the North York Moors today and the heavily burdened Rowan and Elder trees suggest that Keats might have been onto something—though perhaps he should have added a note about the dreariness of it all. The first of September does, after all, signal the grim passage from a half-hearted summer to an impending autumnal slog.

As the nights creep ever earlier, the bracken yellows in surrender, and skeins of geese noisily flee the scene, we are left to rue our grand summer plans—those fleeting dreams now conveniently postponed until some distant, hypothetical future. And what awaits us? Only the pleasure of battling through gusty winds, drenching rain, and the merciless approach of winter’s icy clutches. We shall, no doubt, while away the months awaiting the faintest hint that “spring is in the air”, only to have it flit by. One might almost suspect that spring itself conspires to avoid us, darting in and out before we have a chance to do that “spring clean.”

Still, I cannot begin to summon the energy to feign excitement for any season, let alone for whatever variety of weather the heavens deem fit to unleash. It is what it is. The endless rotation of seasons is as inescapable as the passage of time, and if we must endure it, we might as well make an effort to admire the view as we plod along.

Now, as for when autumn officially begins, it seems there is some debate—though, in the end, it matters little to anyone but meteorologists and the calendar-obsessed. The first date is conveniently fixed for those who find comfort in predictability: meteorologists have split the year into four tidy segments, each lasting three months, thus declaring the first of September as autumn’s official commencement, ending neatly on the thirtieth of November.

Yet, when we ordinary folk speak of autumn’s beginning, we tend to mean the astronomical autumn, which relies on the Earth’s axis and its dance around the Sun. This year, that time-honoured version of autumn will begin on the twenty-second of this month and conclude on the twenty-first of December. Perhaps this is simply a means of delaying our confrontation with the inevitable onset of winter, as if a few more weeks of denial might somehow stave off the cold. But alas, such tricks of the calendar will do little to soften the blow. Winter, as always, will have the last laugh.