September: the very name has magic. In an old book, half in Latin
half in English, about the months, which I came upon in a forgotten
moth-eaten library years ago, and in part copied, and to my regret
have not seen or heard of since, or anywhere been able to trace, I
remember a singular passage about this month. Much had been said about
the flowers of ‘these golden weekes that doe lye between the thunderous
heates of summer and the windy gloomes of winter’; of those flowers
and plants which bloom in gardens, and those, as the harebell and
poppy and late-flowering gorse, which light the green garths of meadow
and woodland; as the bryony, which trails among the broken copses and
interweaves the ruddy masses of bramble; as the traveller’s-joy, which
hangs its frail wreaths of phantom-snow along the crests of every
hedgerow of beech and hornbeam. Of the changing colours of the trees,
too, the old writer had much to say: of the limes ‘that become wan
and spotted as a doe,’ of the mountain-ash ‘that has its long fingers
dyed redd and browne,’ of ‘the wyche-elme whose gold is let loose on
the wind after nighte-frosts and cold dawnes.’ Nor did he forget that
‘greate beautie of mistes’ which we all know; and he reached eloquence
when he spoke of the apple-orchards and of the wall-fruits of ‘olde
manor-gardenns’--‘the peache that women and poetes doe make the queene
of fruites,’ ‘the rich glowe and savour of the apricock,’ ‘the delicate
jargonell that keepes the sweetes of France in olde warme English
gardenns.’ Of wild-fruit, also, he had dainty words and phrases.
Blackberries, ‘the darke-blue bilberry,’ the sloe ‘whose excellent
purple bloode maketh so fine a comfort,’ ‘the dusky clustres of the
hasel,’ ‘the green-smockt filberte,’ and so forth. Even upon mushrooms
he had words of sun and wind and dew, so lightsome were they, ardent
and joyous, with a swift movement--as though writ by one who remembered
gathering ‘musherooms’ in a sun-sweet dawn after a night of heavy dews,
in company with another who laughed often in gladness and was dearest
and fairest of all dear and fair things. ‘Howbeit,’ he added, after
sorrowing that ‘many doe feare these goodly musherooms as poysonis
dampe weedes,’ ‘this dothe in nowise abate the exceedynge excellence of
Goddes providence that out of the grasse and dewe where nothing was,
and where onlie the lytell worme turned in his sporte, come as at the
shakynge of bells these delicate meates.’
Then, after some old-world lore about ‘the wayes of nature with beastes
and byrdes’ in this month, he goes further afield. ‘And this monthe,’
he says, ‘is the monthe of dreames, and when there is a darke (or
secret) fyre in the heartes of poetes, and when the god of Love is
fierce and tyrannick in imaginings and dreames, and they doe saye in
deedes also, yett not after the midwaye of the monthe; butt whye I know
not.’
We hear so much of the poet-loved and poet-sung month of May, and
the very name of June is sweet as its roses and white lilies and
lavender, that it is become a romantic convention to associate them
with ‘dreames’ and the ‘tyrannick’ season of ‘the god of Love.’ But
I am convinced that the old Elizabethan or Jacobean naturalist was
right. May and June are months of joy, but September is the month of
‘dreames’ and ‘darke fyre.’ Ask those who love nature as the poet is
supposed to love her, with something of ecstasy perhaps, certainly
with underglow of passion: ask those in whom the imagination is as a
quickening and waning but never absent flame: ask this man who travels
from month to month seeking what he shall never find, or this woman
whose memories and dreams are many, howsoever few her hopes ... and the
chance will be that if asked to name the month of the heart’s love, it
will be September. I do not altogether know why this should be so, if
so it is. There is that in June which has a time-defying magic: May has
her sweet affinities with Spring in the human heart: in April are the
flutes of Pan: March is stormy with the clarions of the winds: October
can be wild with all wildness or be the calm mirror of the passing
of the loveliness of the green-world. There is not a month that has
not its own signal beauty, so that many love best February, because
through her surge of rains appear days of blue wonder, with the song
of the missel-thrush tost like spray from bare boughs--or November,
because in the grey silence one may hear the fall of the sere leaves,
and see mist and wan blueness make a new magic among deserted woods--or
January, when all the visible world lies in a white trance, strange and
still and miraculous as death transfigured to a brief and terrible
loveliness on the face of one suddenly quiet from the fever of youth
and proud beauty. There is not a month when the gold of the sun and the
silver of the moon are not woven, when the rose of sunset does not lie
upon hills which reddened to the rose of dawn, when the rainbow is not
let loose from the tangled nets of rain and wind, when the morning-star
and the evening-star do not rise and set.
And yet, for some, there is no month that has the veiled magic of
September.
‘The month of peace,’ ‘the month of beauty,’ it is called in many
Gaelic songs and tales; and often, ‘Summer-end.’ I remember an old
_rann_, perhaps still said or sung before the peat-fires, that it was
in this month God created Peace; again, an island-tale of Christ as a
shepherd and the months as sheep strayed upon the hills of time. The
Shepherd went out upon the hills, and gathered them one by one, and
led them to the fold: but, before the fold was reached, a great wind
of snow came down out of the corries, and on the left a wild flood
arose, and on the narrow path there was room only, and that hardly,
for the Shepherd. So He looked to see which one of the twelve He might
perchance save, by lifting it in His strong arms and going with it
alone to the fold. He looked long, for all were the children of His
Father. Then He lifted September, saying, ‘Even so, because thou art
the month of fulfilment, and because thy secret name is Peace.’ But
when He came out of the darkness to the fold, the Shepherd went back
between the wild lips of flood and tempest, and brought to the fold
June, saying, ‘Because thy secret name is Joy’: and, in turn, one by
one, He brought each to the fold, saying unto each, in this order,
‘May, because thy secret name is Love’; ‘April, because thou art made
of tears and laughter’; ‘July, because thou art Beauty’; ‘August, thou
quiet Mother’; ‘October, because thy name is Content’; ‘March, because
thy name is Strife’; ‘February, because thy name is Hope’; ‘November,
because thy name is Silence’; ‘January, because thou art Death’; and at
the last, ‘December, whom I have left to the end, for neither tempest
could whelm nor flood drown thee, for thy name is the Resurrection and
the Life.’
And when the tale was told, some one would say, ‘But how, then, was
September chosen first?’
And the teller would say, ‘Because its secret name is Peace, and Peace
is the secret name of Christ.’
It is no wonder the poets have loved so well this month whose name
has in it all the witchery of the North. There is the majesty of the
hill-solitudes in it, when the moorlands are like a purple sea. It has
the freshness of the dew-white bramble-copses, of the bracken become
russet and pale gold, of the wandering frostfire along the highways of
the leaf, that mysterious breath whose touch is silent flame. It is
the month when the sweet, poignant second-song of the robin stirs the
heart as a child’s gladness among tears. ‘The singer of September,’ a
Gaelic poet calls it, and many will recall the lovely lines of the old
half-forgotten Elizabethan poet on the bird
“That hath the bugle eyes and ruddy breast
And is the yellow autumn’s nightingale.”
It is strange how much bird-lore and beast-lore lie with September. The
moorcock, the stag, the otter, the sea-wandering salmon, the corncrake,
and the cuckoo and the swift, I know not how many others, have their
tale told or their farewell sung to the sound and colour of September.
The poets have loved it for the unreturning feet of Summer whose
vanishing echoes are in its haunted aisles, and for the mysterious
silences of the veiled arrivals of Winter. It is the month of the
year’s fulfillings--
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close-bosom’d friend of the maturing sun.”
And yet there are other Septembers than the Septembers of memory, than
the Septembers of the imagination. For three years past the month
has come with rains from the sea and cold winds out of the east and
north. The robin’s song has been poignantly sweet as of yore, but the
dream-glow has been rare upon the hill and valley, and in the woods
and on the moor-slopes the leaf has hung bannerets of dusky yellow,
and the bracken burned dully without amber and flamelit bronze. This
year, though, there has been some return of those September days which
we believe in while yet a long way off, as we believe in May, as we
feel assured of June. This last June was truly a month of roses, and
in May the east wind slept: but last year the roses trailed along
flooded byways, and the east wind nipped bud and blossom through the
bleak days of ‘the merry month,’ and a colourless and forlorn September
must have chilled even that ‘darke fyre in the heartes of poetes’ of
which the old naturalist wrote. There have been days of peace this
year, and of the whole beauty of Summer-end. In the isles, among
the hills, on forest lands and uplands, and by the long plains and
valleys of the south, the September blue--which is part a flame of
azure and part a haze of the dust of pearls--has lain over land and
sea like a benediction. How purple the western moors, what depths of
floating violet and pale translucencies of amethyst on the transfigured
mountains. What loveliness of pale blue mist in the hollows of quiet
valleys; what richness of reds and ambers where the scarlet-fruited ash
hangs over the unruffled brown pool; what profuse gold and ungathered
amber where the yellow gorse climbs the hillside and the armies of
the bracken invade every windy solitude. How lovely those mornings
when the dew is frost-white and the gossamer is myriad in intricate
interlacings that seem woven of aerial diamond-dust. What peace in that
vast serenity of blue where not the smallest cloud is seen, where only
seaward the gannet may hang immeasurably high like a winged star, or,
above inland pastures, the windhover poise in his miraculous suspense.
But, alas, only ‘days.’ It has not been the September of the heart’s
desire, of the poet’s dream. The advance-guard of the equinox has
again and again come in force: the grey wind has wailed from height to
height, and moaned among the woods. Even in the gardens the wall-fruits
have hardly given the wonted rich warmth, though the apples have made
a brave show. Yesterday there was a hush in the wind; a delicate frost
lingered after a roseflusht dawn; and the inward light came out of the
heather, the bracken and the gorse, out of the yellow limes and the
amber planes and the changing oaks, and upon the hillside turned the
great pine on the further crag into a column of pale gold and made the
lichened boulders like the half-sunken gates of buried cities of topaz
and jasper and chalcedony. But to-day vast masses of sombre cloud have
been swung inland from the Atlantic, and the gale has the wild mournful
sough that we look for in the dark months. It is in the firelight that
one must recapture September. It lies hidden in that warm heart, amid
the red and yellow flowers of flame: and in that other heart, which,
also, has its ‘darke fyre,’ that heart in whose lands lit by neither
sun nor moon are the secret glens where old dreams live again, and
where the dreams of the hour are radiant in their new wonder and their
new beauty.