The Autumn of Life

Yesterday I found myself in my Creative Writing class with my plans for the class upended.  I had planned to give them time in class to write, but we changed the due date to Tuesday, so it makes more sense for Tuesday to be the writing day.

Happily, I had come prepared with the worksheet that I described in this blog post, the Build Your Own Ode to a Season worksheet.  While they did that, I pulled up Keats' "To Autumn" on the Poetry site (the site that has the materials from the magazine, along with many other resources).  We listened to the poem without following along, and then we listened while we followed along, with the poem projected on the larger screen.  And then we talked about it.

What a treat to talk about this poem.  The more I read it, the more perfect it seems.

Because it was a Creative Writing class, we talked about the symbolism of autumn, the symbols themselves and how a story or a poem set in autumn might use that season as a symbol.  It made me think about who is in the autumn of their lives and who is not.

When Keats wrote this poem, he knew that he had TB, and he must have known that he was likely to die--so he was in the winter of his life.

I am 60 years old, so clearly in the autumn of my life.  But I want to think it's early autumn, September not late November.

Last week, I posted this picture, mist rising off the lake.  I can't always capture the mist, but I think I was successful here:

Yesterday I read the first line of "To Autumn":  "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness."  I asked my students if the mornings had been misty lately.  They looked startled.  I realized that they probably wouldn't know.  They're probably up after the sun has risen and burned off the mist.

But here at a higher altitude, it's been very foggy/misty, and I've really enjoyed watching the swirls.  I've thought of past generations, surrounded by fog and mist and smoke, and it's no wonder they believed in ghosts, that they described ghosts the way they did.

I'm feeling a bit haunted myself.  It's strange to teach this poem to students who are not much older than Keats was when he wrote this perfect poem.  It's strange to think how much older I am than my students.  When I first started teaching, I was only a few years older than my students.  Now I am decades older.

Like Keats, I'm haunted by my mortality.  Let this haunting prompt me to do my best work!