Fall, Robert Frost, and the Flowering of Loss

Joshua Lore

“On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked in fear…” —John 20:19

This is the second year in quite a long time that I haven’t been involved with farming in some way — it feels a sad exile not somehow immersed or at least in close proximity to work so in tune with the seasons — but even still, in this time of year, there is yet (and has been since I was young) both a deep and peculiar sorrow Fall seems to visit on me and an eager readiness for rest and huddled warmth that I feel swell up in my heart at the creeping chill and the hush-sounds of ruinous foliage swept dryly across the mute terrain, so recently awash with color. It instills in me its own array of mixed emotions and remembrances beyond the veil: of lost love, of the inevitability and role of death within life, of our retreat before the hearth as the cold clasp of winter closes down outside the door (O, Hestia!), of simple but weighty memories. But in that melancholy rush one remembers too of the warmth and goodness of love, of family, of closeness and the solemn joy of togetherness: of companionship. It beckons us to turn away from our laboring and toward one another, as well as inwards.

This slow turning of Summer toward Winter perhaps still shapes our common lives like nothing else, be we farmers or not (possibly we all long in some way back toward our agrarian beginnings…). Poet Mary Kinzie laconically sums up the dissonant emotions this time of year draws out calling Fall “the flowering of loss….the ripening of diminishment into husk and hull.” Winter is a time of pallid silence, of stillness; but it is a pregnant silence and stillness too, and even in its most desolate days we quietly remember that it gives way to kaleidoscopic Spring. That time before both the Birth and the Resurrection is hard, filled with uncertainty and hiding and tearful longing, but it draws us close, and is ripe with promise.

Today, though, in the early throes of the whole ordeal my mind has been on that ripening of diminishment, and I’ve had Robert Frost’s ‘Reluctance’ on the heart. I’ll leave you with it:

Reluctance
Robert Frost

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?