To Autumn: Finding Autumn Wedding Inspiration Through Poetry & Prayer
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring with him how to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; / To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; / To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease, / For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? / Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find / Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, / Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; / Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, / Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook / Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: / And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep / Steady thy laden head across a brook; / Or by a cider-press, with patient look, / Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-- / While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, / And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; / Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn / Among the river sallows, borne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; / And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; / Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft / The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft, / And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”
From John Keats,“To Autumn”
Every autumn, I return to a beloved poem, Keats’s finest ode, “To Autumn.” The musicality of that poem, and its portrait of the ephemeral nature of life, overcomes me. Few works of art more fully capture the crowning glories of the harvest, and its melancholy aftermath. Every year I read it—a year older—the reading becomes more sober, more intimately felt. I understand the passage of time. The maturing of life past its springtime of hope and promise. When I look on autumn’s beauty, it is with an intensity of emotion: it is so beautiful because it is leaving us. The light is so radiant, right as it is fading. Nature is at her finest, painted burnished and golden colors, before her dying. That last gasp of beauty before winter—it’s a revelation. The transience is the entire point: the reason for autumn’s loveliness, a beauty bound with pain. As I live longer, I understand the melancholy beauty of autumn, the cycles of nature in which we all participate.
The poem opens in summer, with luscious visions of fruits and flowers—the fruition, the height and glory of the harvest.
“It has taken all summer,” notes Caitlin Kimball in her explication, “to grow the sweetest, densest, most delectable portion of the harvest.” We see nature and harvesters exerting all their energy to grow these choice gifts. The sheer amount of energy and industry is incredible: the “stanza’s headiness and sensuality,” writes Kimball, “derives not just from the gorgeous visions of fruit and flowers, but also from the outlay of energy, compressed into present-tense, multisyllabic verbs.” The verse is sensory and sensual, engaging sight, taste, touch. The trees are bent with the weight of apples, the vines blessed with fruit, and late flowers give nectar to the bees, whose hives overflow with honey. A veritable feast for the senses, the stanza is gorgeous to read aloud, with gentle sibilance and musical vowels, often difficult to say, like a mouthful of ripe fruit. I am reminded of those honeyed days of late summer when dahlias grow wild, and roses tumble over trellises, heady with fragrance. You could walk through a dahlia patch and find flowers seemingly as numerous as stars in the sky-- could pick to your heart’s content, flowers in honey, cream, and café au lait colors. Like the bees in Keats’s poem, you could easily be fooled into thinking “warm days will never cease.” So it is the summertime of our lives, when we are young, and life appears so full of opportunities, ripe for the choosing.
In the next stanza, time has passed. Autumn is presented as a harvester who has already a “store” of grain, whose fields have an overgrowth of “twined flowers.”
The second stanza’s sounds are soft and whispery, like the “winnowing wind” which caresses the harvester’s “soft-lifted hair.” In contrast to the first stanza’s frenetic energy, these verses are languorous, “drows’d with the fume of poppies.” The apples that once bowed the branches of trees have been taken to a cider press, which oozes drop by delicious drop. If there is no longer the hopefulness of growth, the promise of spring, or the fullness of late summer, of realization, Autumn here has a mesmerizing quality.
The third stanza, however, is heartbreaking. The day is “soft-dying,” the fields emptied, though faintly glowing beneath a pink sky. Nature and the harvesters worked so desperately to produce such growth—and now the scene is desolate, gesturing towards the inevitability of winter. No flowers adorn the fields; no fruit bends tree branches. What was all the work for? one is tempted to ask. And yet, though tragic, how lyrical this moment is. Keats fills the Autumn scene with the music of nature: lambs bleating, crickets singing, robins trilling, and swallows twittering. Nature’s choir lifts their voices in lament. Writes Kimball in her beautiful guide:
“Though Keats doesn’t make any overt attempt to reconcile autumn’s tragic nature, that his consciousness makes music of the creatures’ noises reminds us that this is a poetic creation. As much as the poet has absorbed his senses in an essence apart from himself, making no evaluations or claims for transcendence, he has taken pains to rescue and preserve the season whole—diminishment and all. Like the Greek figures on Keats’s urn, the scene is forever unfolding, round and perfect in its paradox of action and stasis. It is always not yet winter.”
We cannot help but ache over a poem written in the poet’s own autumn season. Keats, aged 23, had that summer been extraordinarily prolific, crafting the odes which culminated in “To Autumn,” the height of his genius and pinnacle of his poetic concept of negative capability. At the time of his flourishing, however, tuberculosis was already taking over. “A few months later,” writes Kimball, “the illness worsened and his doctor advised him to curb his writing to preserve what was left of his vitality. That summer of 1819, the season of Keats’s flourishing that culminated in ‘To Autumn,’ would be the poet’s own autumn.”
As I read this piece, I am overcome by the sadness and inevitability of the passage of time. We know how it feels to be young and alive, bursting with energy and hope. Though each life is called to different trials, in these early years, perhaps we had not suffered much loss, much disappointment, much of the refining work of trials. All to us then was springtime. With age comes loss—even the subtle loss of time, of opportunities. We are saddened to see our loved ones grow older. And then our autumn years also, though tinged with sadness, have a maturity and music, a wisdom and serenity.
While Keats’s poem offers no great consolations, we who have faith in Christ know the consolation of the faith.
I am reminded of this even in through this poetic work, especially its third stanza, with its “ever-unfolding present tense.” For those who believe, there is indeed hope eternal, “ever-unfolding,” and ever secure. We are not bound to the ephemeral cycles of this mortal frame. For we have a Shepherd-King who is kind in all His offices, who gives to us “eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of [His] hand” (John 10:28). That eternal life is ours to enjoy, even now, if we have Him.
We may be moved by the ephemeral beauty of nature, by the painful beauty of transient things. But we who have faith see every season, every flower, every leaf as the handiwork of the Creator. We know it is blessed by the Divine imagination and touch. And we know that this fading earth, where we see in a glass darkly, is not all there is for us—an eternity of bliss lies beyond. And yet that eternal life is ours to enjoy, even now. When we receive Christ, he gives us a present salvation to be enjoyed. “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). “Cleanseth,” emphasizes Charles Spurgeon in a devotion on the verse:
“not ‘shall cleanse.’ There are multitudes who think thas as a dying hope they may look forward to pardon. Oh! how infinitely better to have cleansing now than to depend upon the bare possibility of forgiveness when I come to die. Some imagine that a sense of pardon is an attainment only obtainable after many years of Christian experience. But forgiveness of sin is a present thing—a privilege for this day, a joy for this very hour. The moment a sinner trusts in Jesus he is fully forgiven. The text, being written in the present tense, also indicates continuance; it was ‘cleanseth’ yesterday, it is ‘cleanseth’ to-day, it will be ‘cleanseth’ to-morrow: it will be always so with you, Christian, until you cross the river; every hour you may come to this fountain, for it cleanseth still.”
Present salvation, present forgiveness, present eternity. The glory of what Christ has won for us is beautiful beyond expression or comprehension. It is Spurgeon also who offers a surpassingly beautiful depiction of the harvest, and the perfect counter to Keats’s tragic autumn. Writes Spurgeon in a meditation on harvest gifts:
“All year round, every hour of the day, God is richly blessing us; both when we sleep and when we wake His mercy waits upon us. The sun may leave us a legacy of darkness, but our God never ceases to shine upon His children with beams of love. Like a river, His lovingkindness is always flowing, with a fulness inexhaustible as His own nature. Like the atmosphere which constantly surrounds the earth, and is always ready to support the life of man, the benevolence of God surrounds all His creatures; in it, as in their element, they live, and move, and have their being. Yet as the sun on summer days gladdens us with beams more warm and bright than at others times, and as rivers are at certain seasons swollen by the rain, and as the atmosphere itself is sometimes fraught with more fresh, more bracing, or more balmy influences than heretofore, so it is with the mercy of God; it hath its golden hours; its days of overflow, when the Lord magnifieth His grace before the sons of men. Amongst the blessings of the nether springs, the joyous days of harvest are a special season of excessive favour. It is the glory of autumn that the ripe gifts of providence are then abundantly bestowed; it is the mellow season of realization, whereas all before was but hope and expectation. Great is the joy of the harvest. Happy are the reapers who fill their arms with the liberality of heaven. The Psalmist tells us that the harvest is the crowning of the year. Surely these crowning mercies call for crowning thanksgiving! Let us render it by the inward emotions of gratitude. Let our hearts be warmed; let our spirits remember, meditate, and think upon this goodness of the Lord. Then let us praise Him with our lips, and laud and magnify His name from whose bounty all goodness flows. Let us glorify God by yielding our gifts to His cause. A practical proof of our gratitude is a special thanks-offering to the Lord of the harvest.”
When I have created floral designs for weddings, I have kept both these ideas—ephemerality and eternity—in mind. When I planned, ordered, or foraged for flowers, I looked deliberately for things faded, fleeting, asymmetrical. A collection of leaves can chronicle autumn’s passage; an individual flower can move us with its tiny graces and imperfections. Its beauty transcends the flaw.
Flowers are a living art form, subject to time, decay, and the thousand variables of their growing conditions. For this reason—and because of the beauty of everything God creates—they should not be controlled. I believe strongly that we should not impose our ideas upon flowers, insisting on stiff, Pinterest-perfection. A floral artist should constantly dance between artistry and surrender, effort and restraint, and should know when to take her hands off of an arrangement.
The realness, the tender pathos of flowers, speaks to us more deeply than anything artificial, frozen, or perfect. They are beautiful because they are fleeting-- because their lives are so glorious, but so brief-- because they die. And yet they are beautiful because they were an idea in the mind of the Creator, and thus contain a glimmer of eternity, as the unfolding work of His hands.
In autumn, I am drawn to floral work designed not only in the colors of the seasons—burnished hues, russet, wine, aubergine, chocolate, smoke, gold— I also love an unexpected, soft take on autumn.
White flowers, in autumn, are particularly striking against chocolate foliage. Pastel palettes feel refreshing; pale mint, blush, lavender, and blue hues take on a certain poignancy in fall. A pastel autumn is something I began embracing several seasons ago, charmed by Grandmillenial- styled tables and pale fashion edits. I love taking these ideas from other fields—fashion, interiors, lifestyle—and approaching weddings in a fresh way. Like any other art form, floristry is most interesting when it is conversant with other design fields.
And of course, flowers offer a complexity of color sometimes beyond what even paint and brush can achieve.
Take Distant Drums, a rose that flourishes in autumn. Her petals are sepia, her center apricot. When she blooms, she is a lush peach, and when she fades, a soft mocha.
These are indecipherable, inexpressible colors. Never straightforward, always painterly. So many of the floral colors—blush, apricot, lavender—are muted with brown and mocha, giving them depth, rendering them complex, intelligent. Flowers even within the same bunch differ drastically—as individual as each life God creates—reminding us that His eye is indeed on the sparrow, and the flower, and even the tiniest portion of that flower.
Inspired by the Dutch Masters, I love to create for wedding tables an evocative floral still life, layered with crystal, candles, and seasonal fruits (and sometimes vegetables). Figs are sensuous, especially when sliced, and passionfruit surprising, with its saffron center. As I handle these beautiful objects, I always feel like I am opening a case of jewels. They are positively opulent. Layering flowers with fruits, there is a language of touch, interlaced with that of fragrance, taste, and sight. I uncase gooseberries from their shells, a fun and crinkly task, and admire the heavy, velvety weight of the figs. White and pink currants are almost too darling for words—like grapes but more unexpected. Once, I used date palms as a table runner, as the kind of foundation on which a fruit-laced tablescape was built. The date palms lent to that wedding the element of surprise which subsequently made everything else make sense. Added to the scene, candles in various stages of melt, much crystalware, and florals that expressed autumn’s melancholy nature—the glorious last gasp of beauty before winter.
In the end, what is seasonal is always what is most beautiful, for it has a fidelity to God’s creation and intention.
While I love to converse with other fields of design and explore editorial concepts, I cannot improve upon the perfection of all God provides and creates. The moments of beauty He gives, with such unrestrained kindness and largesse, and that which He deems best to withhold. Under His canopy of grace, in ways we cannot fully realize, all is blessing and favor upon the heart which believes. Even autumn, the harvest’s aftermath, has its music, however mournful, and light, though fading. And the promise, for those who receive it, of that which persists beyond the inevitability of winter and decay. A rebirth, a redemption, which is never imperiled, never insecure, never in question.
