LATEST RELEASE

MIXED BUSINESS
A sequence of inter-connected narratives from pre–World War One to the 2020s, Mixed Business is Alan Wearne’s latest contribution to the verse novel genre. With a cast of over one hundred characters, this book is a risky, imaginative, large-scale history of 20th and 21st Century urban Australia.

POEM OF THE MONTH:

To Autumn

by JOHN KEATS

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,
Drows’d 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 cyder-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 red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Alan’s Notes:
One of my great poetry moments at High School was in 4th Form: the unfolding of John Keats To Autumn by our English teacher, Noel Maggs. A man of high-powered wit, he was very well read and possessed an ability to teach quite beyond the conventional. Certainly, that’s how he taught me, and I still hope plenty of us. With his line-by-line explication still very much what I recall, he showed us how both Keats’ season unfolded parallel indeed with that of an Autumn day.

Of course, this still must remain an early 19th Century poem, written in a language slightly removed from how folk talked in the middle of the 20th Century, with that kind of semi-archaic language in which the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer were written, and was still being used throughout the Church of England. Perhaps, because of my somewhat of an Anglican upbringing, I was aware of that kind of English, this meaning that I didn’t have to adjust as much as some… for wasn’t this how poems could have been written, if not exactly now?

As for the subject matter? Even if this was an evocation of Autumn in a deciduous landscape, set around English village and farm-life, we still had enough knowledge for there to be not that much of an adjustment in evergreen suburban Melbourne, where Autumn for some, probably meant as much the start of the football season. Of course, one wonders how this poem might be received by those raised in, say, the tropics, those indeed who had to be told much more of a seasonal background than what we knew.

And given the whole concept of climate change I wonder how this poem might be regarded two, three four centuries into the future. Will there be an Autumn of any kind? Though whatever that verdict the fault would certainly not lie with Keats. The amount of imaginative detail is quite astounding, and yet the poem though wonderfully lush never feels overloaded. And even better there’s the sheer risk of actually personifying Autumn in the second stanza. If as a poet, you wish to plain ‘get away with it…’ please start by using To Autumn as an example.