THE CURATED LIFE
“WITH WHAT A GLORY comes and goes the year!” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the opening lines of his poem “Autumn.” It is a theme that obviously resonated with the poet; the colors excited him, and the word picture he painted is seductive: “There is a beautiful spirit breathing now/Its mellow richness on the clustered trees,/ And, from a beaker full of richest dyes,/Pouring new glory on the autumn woods,/And dipping in warm light the pillared clouds.”
However, as a chronic heliophile, I am afraid that I cannot get quite as excited about the end of summer as the author of “The Song of Hiawatha.” The season that for Keats was “close bosom-friend of the maturing sun” is in my eyes more of a viper in the bosom; the sinister, ominous overture for shorter, darker, colder, wetter days. It is a melancholic time of year; the only reason the leaves are turning such pretty colors is because the chlorophyll is leaving them as a prelude to their withering death.