Autumn and the poets

I love autumn. People often find it depressing, and it is true that Nature loses the glorious colours of spring and summer, the skies cloud over and temperatures drop. Or at least they used to, at quite distinct moments of the year. For some time now we notice the seasons disturbed, and on a beautiful autumn day like today it is good at last to feel the ‘right’ seasonal weather at the ‘right’ time. Autumn has always been a favourite season for the poets, especially the Romantics, who of course associate it with loss, with death or just absence. There is a gentle melancholy to it, more so than winter, which is less subtle in this respect, in its stark bareness. But the association of autumn with loss and melancholy of course predates the Romantics; Shakespeare saw in it, as he saw in all seasons, a mirror of the human soul and its endless shifting moods.

In Sonnet 97, the speaker expresses his sense of loss during his absence from his beloved, and he does this through the seasons. Although the time of absence was summer, it felt like winter. And when autumn came, without his beloved, the riches of autumn came to ripeness for nothing :

And yet this time remov'd was summer's time,

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,

Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,

Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:

Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me

But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit;

Shakespeare sees the natural world as dynamic, inhabited by spirit, animated in the original sense of having a soul; autumn is ‘big with rich increase’, pregnant, yet a pregnant widow because the ‘lord’, the beloved, is no longer there to welcome the ‘issue’, the offspring. It is beautiful to consider the autumn ‘bearing the wanton burthen (burden) of the prime’ ; nature is almost over-abundant in its generosity, it is ‘wanton’ - meaning here without restraint, and it carries the burden, like a pregnant mother, in an act of giving its ‘child’ to the world. This sense of nature as ‘spiritful’ and animated differs greatly from our modern view, based largely on the scientific reduction of nature to a series of discrete separate objects to be observed from "the outside", mere parts of a mechanism whose sole purpose is regarded as a closed circuit of material self-perpetuation. And not as bearer of meaning. 

Here is the whole sonnet:

How like a winter hath my absence been

From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!

What old December's bareness everywhere!

And yet this time remov'd was summer's time,

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,

Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,

Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:

Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me

But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit;

For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,

And thou away, the very birds are mute;

Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer

That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.