Suspending Winter Willingly in Disbelief / Cathleen Harvea Guthrie

 

Suspending Winter Willingly in Disbelief

Spring whistled a happy tune ... summer sang.
    Autumn's song being sung and winter's song
    Yet to come ... a cold hard song ... far too long, 
Winter's known song ... a frosty frigid ... pang!

The end of summer comes in disbelief:
    Autumnal apples fall far from the trees;
    Sweet honey stolen from the honeybees;
Luscious fruit with sweetness lends some relief.

The gifts of spring and summer ... love bestowed.
    Gratitude for the fruits of the season –
    Gratitude for plentiful pleasing reason.
From the summer season much bounty flowed.

Seen on display, the farmer's market showed
    The fresh fruits of love's organic labor.
    A just picked garden carrot ... to savor!
To buy artisanal produce much is owed.

Spring whistled a happy tune ... summer sang.
    Autumn's song being sung and winter's song
    Yet to come ... a cold hard song ... far too long,
Winter's known song ... a frosty frigid ... pang!

Cold hard fact:
    As fleeting pleasures fade in disbelief ...
    Suspension of disbelief assuages grief.

~~
Cathleen Harvea Guthrie, 2025 

from #autumnalpoemsbycathleenharveaguthrie 

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), Apple Gatherers, ca, 1859. Wikimedia Commons.

Autumn / Richard Chenevix Trench

Autumn

Thine, autumn, is unwelcome lore,
To tell the world its pomp is o'er.

To whisper in the rose's ear
That all her beauty is no more;

And bid her own the faith how vain,
Which spring to her so lately swore.

 
A queen deposed, she quits her state;
The nightingales her fall deplore.

The hundred-voiced bird may woo
The thousand-leaved flower no more.

The jasmine sinks its head in shame,
The sharp east wind its tresses tore,

And robbed in passing cruelly
The tulip of the crown it wore.

The lily's sword is broken now,
That was so bright and keen before;

And not a blast can blow, but strews
With leaf of gold the earth's dank floor,

The piping winds sing Nature's dirge,
As through the forest bleak they roar,

Whose leafy screen, like locks of eld,
Each day shows scantier than before.

Thou fadest as a flower, O man!
Of food for musing here is store.

O man, thou fallest as a leaf!
Pace thoughtfully earth's leafstrewn floor;

Welcome the sadness of the time,
And lay to heart this natural lore.

~~

Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1866)
from Poems, 1865

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Richard Chenevix Trench autobiography

"The Seasons" by Trench, read by Sonia for LibriVox. Courtesy Rhodoclassics.

("Autumn" begins at 4:15.)

Memory of My Father / Patrick Kavanagh

Memory of My Father

Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.

That man I saw in Gardner Street
Stumbled on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.

And I remember the musician
Faltering over his fiddle
In Bayswater, London,
He too set me the riddle.

Every old man I see
In October-coloured weather
Seems to say to me:
"I was once your father."

~~
Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)
from A Soul for Sale, 1947

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Patrick Kavanagh biography

"Memory of My Father" read by Declan O'Connor.

Courtesy Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation.

The Cricket to October / Anne Whitney

The Cricket to October

The long, pure light, that brings
    To earth her perfect crown of bliss,
Wanes slow, — the thoughtful drooping of the grain,
And the faint breath of the earth-loving things
        Say this.

Oft when the dews at night
    Clasp the cool shadows, all in vain,
I look along the meadows, level, dark,
To see the firefly lift her tender light
        Again.

From the thick-woven shade,
    Where, on the red-cupped moss, to-day,
A crimson ray alit, the bluebird sends
One melancholy note up the brown glade,
        This way.

Last night, I saw an eft
    Crawl to the worm's forsaken bier,
To die there, as I think, — beetle nor bee,
Nor the ephemera's ethereal weft
        Sport here.

Yet great has been life's zest.
    Almost how the grass grows, I know,
And the ant sleeps; the busy summer long,
I have kept the secret of the ground-bird's nest
        Below.

But sweeter my employ
    In some still hours. I seem to live
Too near the beating of earth's mighty heart,
Not to have learned in part how she can joy
        And grieve!

'Twas on a night last June,
    Into the clear, bold sky,
The little stars stole each with separate thrill,
And the mossed fir-top woke its mystic rune
        Close by.

Upon yon westering slope,
    Two glorious human shapes there stood,
Rosy with twilight, listening to my song:
I knew I sang to them of love and hope,
        Life's good.

The little stars' soft rays
    Again thrill through their realm of peace;
One shadow haunts the slope; — a song I sing
To match the broken music of her days,
        Then cease.

~~

Anne Whitney (1821-1915)

from Poems, 1859

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Anne Whitney biography

Vis M, Bush cricket, Kerala, India, 2021. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

October's featured poem

The Penny Blog's featured poem for October 2025:

October, by Elinor Wylie

Beauty has a tarnished dress,
And a patchwork cloak of cloth
Dipped deep in mournfulness,
Striped like a moth
[...]

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2011/10/october-elinor-wylie.html

Penny gets 1,000,000 page views

On September 21, 2025, Penny's Poetry Blog received its millionth page view: a goal we had been hoping and working for since our founding more than 15 years ago. For years it seemed that we would never reach the magic 1,000,000. To put that figure into perspective: six years ago – nine years after our beginning – we still had less than 350,000 views in total. In contrast, we received almost that many views (318,000) in the last 12 months alone. 

What changed? The short answer is that PPB poetry is increasingly showing up on google searches. But that did not happen by itself or overnight. It took years, and thousands of page views, to reach that point; years of finding, blogging, and promoting poems until we became big enough to be noticed. While we are grateful for the resulting flood of new readers, most of all we appreciate those readers who have supported us since the beginning. We hope that all of our readers, both old and new, stay with us as we pursue our next 1,000,000 views.

Penny's Top 20 / September 2025

      

Penny's Top 20

The most-visited poems on  The Penny Blog in August 2025:

  1.  The Dwarf, Wallace Stevens

  2.  Vowels, Arthur Rimbaud

  3.  Jonah, AE Reiff

  4.  Away, George J. Dance

  5.  News, AE Reiff

  6.  Large Red Man Reading, Wallace Stevens

  7.  Amarant, AE Reiff

  8.  The Branch, AE Reiff

  9.  Waiting for Winter, JD Shirk

10.  The Bright Extensive Will, AE Reiff

11.   Angel Standing in the Sun, AE Reiff

12.  Once Like a Light, AE Reiff

13.  The Plant, AE Reiff

14.  Heaven's Man, AE Reiff

15.  Sunlight, AE Reiff

16.  Midnight Cry, R.K. Singh

17.  September, Michael Field

18.  For Once, Then, Something, Robert Frost

19.  Song, Trumbull Stickney

20. Summer Past, John Gray

Source: Blogger, "Stats"