Autumn: My Favorite Season

Not only because I was born in October!  It is a time of color and I am a person who reponds readily to visual stimuli.

Here is a poem about autumn by William Shakespeare.


Sonnet 73
by William Shakespeare (1609)

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.


As a gardiner, I recognize that plants expire this time of the year, no matter how I much I coax them to live a few more weeks.  There is a sadness to the garden in fall.  It is the time to pull up dead plants and toss them into the mulch pile.  But in preparing the ground for the next year's planting, I'm reminded that life is victorious over death and I thank God.