Autumn

Autumn in the poems is a season of dispersal, but not merely of decline: its images hold absence beside a sudden, sacred brilliance. The poems move from the scattering of the speaker’s household to the feast of the Transfiguration, making autumn a measure of loss and a setting for light that seems to arrive from beyond ordinary nature.

Season of Separation

In the poem titled “AUTUMN,” the speaker says that every member of the household has gone their own way and that those once close have long since scattered. The season gives outward form to a private separation: the household, once a center of shared life, persists only as a memory of people dispersed.

The preceding poem, “FALSE SUMMER,” offers a contrasting scene of laughter. A raincape is spread as a rug, and the house shakes with laughter until the windowpanes ring. Set beside autumn’s emptied household, this brief domestic image makes the seasonal sequence feel like a movement from communal warmth toward solitude, rather than a simple description of changing weather.

The Feast of the Transfiguration

Autumn is also named through a specific sacred date: the sixth of August, the Lord’s Transfiguration. The poem recalls the belief that on this day a light without a flame issues from Mount Tabor. The image gives the season a moment of radiance that is not produced by an ordinary fire, placing its brightness within the religious calendar and its account of transformation.

The light is followed by autumn’s refulgence, likened to an oriflamme. That progression joins the season’s visible splendor to the feast’s miraculous illumination: autumn is not only what remains after intimate life has scattered, but also a threshold at which loss and radiance coexist.