The golden glory of October points both to our mortality and to nature's restoration, writes Nicole Koehn.
By Nicole Koehn
When I walk through my grandparents’ acreage in the fall, I can imagine I am in Lothlorien. The trunks of aspen poplars are silvery gray, their branches are graceful, and in October their leaves are the colour of unrefined gold.
I have often expressed Anne of Green Gables’ sentiment that “I am so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it? Look at these maple branches. Don’t they give you a thrill—several thrills?”[1] Yet at the same time I am troubled (“haunted,” Anne would say) by a suspicion that the glory of fall only conceals a deep flaw in the fabric of the universe—a flaw that permeates not only nature but life itself.
In the fall, nature explodes into colour and bounty. Hills and valleys are awash with yellows, oranges, purples, and reds. Orchards are heavy with apples and late cherries. Gardens are overflowing with tomatoes, carrots, onions, and squashes. Evenings linger with golden light slowly melting into dusky blue night. The wind begins to carry a subtle chill and sends long V-formations of Canada Geese flying south. Squirrels scurry hither and thither, packing nuts and pinecones away under leafmeal and in hollow trees.
Yet, despite its bounty, fall reveals the transience of all things. Fall does not exist on its own, but as part of a cycle. It does not herald the beginning of life, but its end. The abundant fruit and vegetables are not signs of forthcoming bounty but the final ripening of a harvest that must be gathered before frost and snow descend on every living thing.
Fall not only reveals the transience of nature. It foreshadows our own death. The 19th century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins contemplates this very thought in his poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.” I often recall these lines alongside Anne’s comment about the beauty of Octobers.
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.[2]
Hopkins understands fall, not just as one of the four seasons, but as one of the many consequences of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. The Fall in Eden shook the cosmos to the core. It not only affected our lives as human beings, but the vast network of life itself. Little Margaret mourns because the green leaves of summer lie decaying on the ground. She thinks that this is all that she grieves. However, Hopkins explains that her sorrow is really rooted in the deeper sorrow of the Fall which will eventually become tangible to her when she faces her own mortality.
Fall is a reminder that the universe is not as it should be. Nature was meant to be full of beauty and bounty all the time, not only in the months just before its death. However, in this season of transience, nature itself also hopes in life to come. Trees lose their leaves so that they can conserve energy against the coming cold—but they also drop fruit that will grow new trees in spring. Fall is not only a sign of our mortality, but a foreshadowing of the Kingdom to come where life will be everlasting.
If both Anne and Hopkins are right in their observations about fall, then the bounty and beauty of fall are not necessarily contrary to its death and transience. The season of fall is one of sin’s marks in the fabric of life. At the same time, the overflowing glory of fall is proof that God’s bounty and beauty are so powerful that they break though the presence of death and transience.
[1] L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (Seal Books, 1996), 120.
[2] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall,” in Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 1995), 26.
Nicole Koehn is a writer, thinker, and scholar. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts at Tyndale University in Toronto, Canada. You can read more of her work on her blog, RememberedLore.wordpress.com, where she reflects on the “Tapestry of Story” and calls readers to un-forget old stories worthy of remembrance.