Cockney lads took to the trees like drapers
to cut out fabrics harvested from Herbst
and Hades - made Morris & Co papers
from suburbia’s Autumn leaf-filled kerbs
at that time Oxford takes frugal dessert
from leaves dyed sauterne madeira and port -
disregards how poetics might revert
from robotics’ influence over aught
and clear the table of Obst and ovest -
these berries signal death the hope of seed
while efts ( not EFTS) swoon in lush modest
burials of mulch - where Keats slowly cedes
a myth - the abundant defeatist
showing the place where Autumn is deepest
Hogacre Common
South Hinksey
Oxford
7 October 2018
John Keats (1795-1821) is too good to write about - at least for his best poems - so I do the present Autumn in my own way, 199 years after his own Ode to Autumn, composed on a hike he took near Winchester.
Reviewers savaged Keats’ ” Endymion” in a far-gone ad hominem manner. They seemed to regard the poet and his verse as “decadent”, and truly for an English poet, he is the poet of decline and decay. It is wrong to infer however that he was melancholy or morbid or lacking in hope. A medical student, he was engaged with the politics and future prospects of his age.
He was also taken as the chief instance of an ungentlemanly “Cockney School” which was thought to lack the education and breeding of Etonians, Oxford and Cambridge alumni. William Morris (1834-96) was a poet and designer and artist strongly influenced by Keats’ verse, so I have used drapers and haberdashers and the famous floral Morris wallpapers as instances of the ” vulgarity” which those reviewers decried.
This poem plays with archaisms and German cognates. Der Herbst is Autumn in German but it is cognate with harvest. Das Obst is one word for fruit related to the English dialect word ovest, meaning leaf mast. Mulch is a play on the German for newt - Der Molch, and an eft is the juvenile terrestrial form of that amphibian, now getting ready to hibernate. I was also having fun with archaic expression ” eftsoons”.
College desserts are a fine tradition at Oxford and Cambridge dating from Tudor times, whereat the diners and guests and high table retire to partake of dried fruit, nuts, a light dessert, and of dessert wines. I like madeira. Yeats refers to muscatel at Christ Church in his ” All Souls’ Eve” but I doubt any college offers that anymore.