In Thomas Hood’s   “Autumn”, the season is apostrophized as an enigmatic person  devoid of shadow. He is just like silence that exists with omnipresence, but does not have any concrete manifestation. Robert Browning  had also  remarked  on the silent appeal of autumn: “Autumn wins you best by this, its mute Appeal to sympathy for its decay.”

He is like ‘silence listening to silence’ because he bears testimony to his own presence and acknowledges the same. This is because nothing would communicate with him to affirm his presence. Neither the lonely bird though it was lonely itself; nor the lowly hedge and solitary thorn. The poet therefore signifies that neither the animate world ( bird) nor the vegetative world(thorn/hedge)  communicated with Autumn .He is typified as an ‘unruly ‘character with his disheveled appearance:

Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,

His locks are qualified with the adjective ‘languid’, when it refers to the persona of Autumn itself. The word ’languid’ is therefore a ‘transferred epithet’. But there is aestheticism even in his unkempt appearance. The word ‘gossamer’ may refer to the material of his dressing: a gauze-like fabric. On the other hand, it may also allude to the spider cobwebs entangled above his head, as ‘gossamer’ also stands for ‘spider silk’. The notion of the accumulated cobwebs again points to the indolent temperament or static nature of Autumn. Autumn is visualized  as wearing a coronet  of golden corn with tangled gossamer outlining the same.

In such a context, one grows nostalgic for the songs of summer. As the Sun is the protagonist of Summer, he is now at rest with the onset of Autumn. He is picturised as hibernating and opening the dusky eyelids. His awakening marks the unification of shade and silence. Morning is personified as a person who sings its arrival with an odorous mouth. Its purity lies in its virginity of being unpolluted by sophistication(through the act of brushing,) The merry birds are also missed. Their  wings are said to  ‘pant’ in their likeliness to the motion of the act of panting. It may also imply that the wings are overcome with fatigue owing to the tiring flight. They make their way lest the owl preys on their lustrous eyes at noon. Their eyes are undazzled owing to the lesser intensity of the autumn noon.
Where are the songs of Summer?–With the sun,

The blooms and blossomings of Summer are conspicuously absent. They seem to be blushing  in the
last sunny hours. The days in autumn are characterized by shorter daylight hours. Therefore it appears as though the Night is suddenly ushered in. “When the mild Eve by sudden Night is prest .” The word ‘eve’ means ‘the period of decreasing daylight from late afternoon until nightfall’.

Prosperina  is an ancient Roman goddess who  according to myth is said to be responsible for the cycle of seasons.   Venus, makes Pluto, fall in love ,through her son  Cupid. She makes Cupid hit Pluto with one of his arrows. Pluto beholds  Prosperina ,who was at the time  in Sicily,  playing with nymphs and collecting flowers, and  immediately falls in love with her. She is abducted by Pluto in order to be married to him and live in the underworld. Her mother Ceres  desperately sets out in search of her. Jupiter makes Prosperina  eat pomegranate seeds  so that she can return to the world of the living every alternate six months. Her shuttling between the two worlds is said to be the reason for the seasons. Ceres welcomes her when it is spring, and the world withers as she returns to her husband (Wikpedia).The melancholy of autumn is therefore equated with the despair of Prosperina.

Proserpina was abducted against her wishes, hence the adjective ‘tearful’ .The phrase ‘gloomy breast’ may refer to the woes of both Prosperina and her mother,Ceres. The glow of summer is equated with pride here. The green prime is the desired maturity. The leafs seemed to twinkle :

The many, many leaves all twinkling?–Three
On the moss’d elm; three on the naked lime
Trembling,–and one upon the old oak-tree!
Dryads, in Greek mythology, were tree nymphs whose mortality depended on the trees that they inhabited. The dryads often disappeared into trees. They are visualized as seeking refuge in the trees. Cypress is  a conifer of northern temperate regions. They find security either in these trees or in the eternity of the holly.”Green’ symbolizes fertility  and the condition of being evergreen. Therefore, the mortal dryads endeavour to seek immortality in the seeming eternity of the green holly.

Where is the Dryad’s immortality?–
Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew,
Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through
In the smooth holly’s green eternity.

The squirrel seems to gloat on the hoardings that he has accomplished. The ants have their storehouses stored to the brim with ripe grain for the approaching winter. The honey bees have reserve honey in their cells. The swallow has also planned for the future. Though the beings are self-sufficient, Autumn  dwells on a melancholy note and sighs tearfull spells. The gloom is phrased as  ‘sunless shadow.’ Autumn is stereotyped again and again as ‘solitary’ through the repetition of the word and its synonyms. The poet Thomas Hood commemorates the dead animate and vegetative world that decays .The last leaves of autumn function as a rosary, in such a perspective , venerating the same. The “wither’d” world now appears as remote as a picture from the drowned past. As a memory that lingers in the inscrutable depths of the unconscious. Here ‘gray’ refers to the depths of the gray cells(brain) as well as the colour of the decayed leaves. One could not fathom the intensity of decay. The poet implies this through the following lines:

Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last
Into that distance, gray upon the gray.
One wonders at the inversion of gender towards the end of the poem. If Autumn was personified as a man at the beginning of the poem, in the end it is portrayed as a languorous woman. One who goes and sits with her is overshaded(over shadowed) by her powerful impact. She wears a coronet of faded flowers that forms her identity. She does hold a face of care, though characterized by the quality of incipient decay. There is enough of withered leaves around to make her a ‘bower’.’Bower’ refers to a woman’ s private chamber  in the medieval  castle.’ Bower also means ‘A shaded, leafy recess; an arbor.’ Her gloom is also her refuge. There is enough of sadness in Her to invite emotions. The rose has always been the symbol for the brevity of life. Especially, in poems with the ‘carpe diem’ motif. Only the woman with the living bloom of conscious cheeks adorns light the most. For the Woman of Autumn, there is enough of sorrow, bitterness (of the decomposed fruits),sarcasm(chilly droppings),fear and shadowy despair. These mixed emotion s form the prison for her soul. It also frames her soul endowing it with an identity of its own.

 

© Rukhaya MK 2010

The content is the copyright of Rukhaya MK. Any line reproduced from the article has to be appropriately documented by the reader. ©Rukhaya MK. All rights reserved.

 

 

Works Cited:

http://ardictionary.com/Eve/5515

http://www.daypoems.net/poems/599.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossamer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proserpina

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bower

http://magickgarden.freehostia.com/DryadsNymphs.html