SEPTEMBER
September: the very name has magic. In an old book, half in Latin half in English, about the months, which I came upon in a forgotten moth-eaten library years ago, and in part copied, and to my regret have not seen or heard of since, or anywhere been able to trace, I remember a singular passage about this month. Much had been said about the flowers of ‘these golden weekes that doe lye between the thunderous heates of summer and the windy gloomes of winter’; of those flowers and plants which bloom in gardens, and those, as the harebell and poppy and late-flowering gorse, which light the green garths of meadow and woodland; as the bryony, which trails among the broken copses and interweaves the ruddy masses of bramble; as the traveller’s-joy, which hangs its frail wreaths of phantom-snow along the crests of every hedgerow of beech and hornbeam. Of thechanging colours of the trees, too, the old writer had much to say: of the limes ‘that become wan and spotted as a doe,’ of the mountain-ash ‘that has its long fingers dyed redd and browne,’ of ‘the wyche-elme whose gold is let loose on the wind after nighte-frosts and cold dawnes.’ Nor did he forget that ‘greate beautie of mistes’ which we all know; and he reached eloquence when he spoke of the apple-orchards and of the wall-fruits of ‘olde manor-gardenns’—‘the peache that women and poetes doe make the queene of fruites,’ ‘the rich glowe and savour of the apricock,’ ‘the delicate jargonell that keepes the sweetes of France in olde warme English gardenns.’ Of wild-fruit, also, he had dainty words and phrases. Blackberries, ‘the darke-blue bilberry,’ the sloe ‘whose excellent purple bloode maketh so fine a comfort,’ ‘the dusky clustres of the hasel,’ ‘the green-smockt filberte,’ and so forth. Even upon mushrooms he had words of sun and wind and dew, so lightsome were they, ardent and joyous, with a swift movement—as though writ by one who remembered gathering ‘musherooms’ in a sun-sweet dawn after a night of heavy dews, in company with another who laughed often in gladness and was dearest and fairest of all dear and fair things. ‘Howbeit,’ he added,after sorrowing that ‘many doe feare these goodly musherooms as poysonis dampe weedes,’ ‘this dothe in nowise abate the exceedynge excellence of Goddes providence that out of the grasse and dewe where nothing was, and where onlie the lytell worme turned in his sporte, come as at the shakynge of bells these delicate meates.’
Then, after some old-world lore about ‘the wayes of nature with beastes and byrdes’ in this month, he goes further afield. ‘And this monthe,’ he says, ‘is the monthe of dreames, and when there is a darke (or secret) fyre in the heartes of poetes, and when the god of Love is fierce and tyrannick in imaginings and dreames, and they doe saye in deedes also, yett not after the midwaye of the monthe; butt whye I know not.’
We hear so much of the poet-loved and poet-sung month of May, and the very name of June is sweet as its roses and white lilies and lavender, that it is become a romantic convention to associate them with ‘dreames’ and the ‘tyrannick’ season of ‘the god of Love.’ But I am convinced that the old Elizabethan or Jacobean naturalist was right. May and June are months of joy, but September is the month of ‘dreames’ and ‘darke fyre.’ Ask those who love nature as the poetis supposed to love her, with something of ecstasy perhaps, certainly with underglow of passion: ask those in whom the imagination is as a quickening and waning but never absent flame: ask this man who travels from month to month seeking what he shall never find, or this woman whose memories and dreams are many, howsoever few her hopes ... and the chance will be that if asked to name the month of the heart’s love, it will be September. I do not altogether know why this should be so, if so it is. There is that in June which has a time-defying magic: May has her sweet affinities with Spring in the human heart: in April are the flutes of Pan: March is stormy with the clarions of the winds: October can be wild with all wildness or be the calm mirror of the passing of the loveliness of the green-world. There is not a month that has not its own signal beauty, so that many love best February, because through her surge of rains appear days of blue wonder, with the song of the missel-thrush tost like spray from bare boughs—or November, because in the grey silence one may hear the fall of the sere leaves, and see mist and wan blueness make a new magic among deserted woods—or January, when all the visible world lies in a white trance, strange and still and miraculous as death transfiguredto a brief and terrible loveliness on the face of one suddenly quiet from the fever of youth and proud beauty. There is not a month when the gold of the sun and the silver of the moon are not woven, when the rose of sunset does not lie upon hills which reddened to the rose of dawn, when the rainbow is not let loose from the tangled nets of rain and wind, when the morning-star and the evening-star do not rise and set.
And yet, for some, there is no month that has the veiled magic of September.
‘The month of peace,’ ‘the month of beauty,’ it is called in many Gaelic songs and tales; and often, ‘Summer-end.’ I remember an oldrann, perhaps still said or sung before the peat-fires, that it was in this month God created Peace; again, an island-tale of Christ as a shepherd and the months as sheep strayed upon the hills of time. The Shepherd went out upon the hills, and gathered them one by one, and led them to the fold: but, before the fold was reached, a great wind of snow came down out of the corries, and on the left a wild flood arose, and on the narrow path there was room only, and that hardly, for the Shepherd. So He looked to see which one of the twelve He might perchance save, by lifting it in His strong arms and going with it alone to thefold. He looked long, for all were the children of His Father. Then He lifted September, saying, ‘Even so, because thou art the month of fulfilment, and because thy secret name is Peace.’ But when He came out of the darkness to the fold, the Shepherd went back between the wild lips of flood and tempest, and brought to the fold June, saying, ‘Because thy secret name is Joy’: and, in turn, one by one, He brought each to the fold, saying unto each, in this order, ‘May, because thy secret name is Love’; ‘April, because thou art made of tears and laughter’; ‘July, because thou art Beauty’; ‘August, thou quiet Mother’; ‘October, because thy name is Content’; ‘March, because thy name is Strife’; ‘February, because thy name is Hope’; ‘November, because thy name is Silence’; ‘January, because thou art Death’; and at the last, ‘December, whom I have left to the end, for neither tempest could whelm nor flood drown thee, for thy name is the Resurrection and the Life.’
And when the tale was told, some one would say, ‘But how, then, was September chosen first?’
And the teller would say, ‘Because its secret name is Peace, and Peace is the secret name of Christ.’
It is no wonder the poets have loved so well this month whose name has in it all the witchery of the North. There is the majesty of the hill-solitudes in it, when the moorlands are like a purple sea. It has the freshness of the dew-white bramble-copses, of the bracken become russet and pale gold, of the wandering frostfire along the highways of the leaf, that mysterious breath whose touch is silent flame. It is the month when the sweet, poignant second-song of the robin stirs the heart as a child’s gladness among tears. ‘The singer of September,’ a Gaelic poet calls it, and many will recall the lovely lines of the old half-forgotten Elizabethan poet on the bird
“That hath the bugle eyes and ruddy breastAnd is the yellow autumn’s nightingale.”
It is strange how much bird-lore and beast-lore lie with September. The moorcock, the stag, the otter, the sea-wandering salmon, the corncrake, and the cuckoo and the swift, I know not how many others, have their tale told or their farewell sung to the sound and colour of September. The poets have loved it for the unreturning feet of Summer whose vanishing echoes are in its haunted aisles, and for the mysterious silences of the veiled arrivals of Winter. It is the month of the year’s fulfillings—
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close-bosom’d friend of the maturing sun.”
And yet there are other Septembers than the Septembers of memory, than the Septembers of the imagination. For three years past the month has come with rains from the sea and cold winds out of the east and north. The robin’s song has been poignantly sweet as of yore, but the dream-glow has been rare upon the hill and valley, and in the woods and on the moor-slopes the leaf has hung bannerets of dusky yellow, and the bracken burned dully without amber and flamelit bronze. This year, though, there has been some return of those September days which we believe in while yet a long way off, as we believe in May, as we feel assured of June. This last June was truly a month of roses, and in May the east wind slept: but last year the roses trailed along flooded byways, and the east wind nipped bud and blossom through the bleak days of ‘the merry month,’ and a colourless and forlorn September must have chilled even that ‘darke fyre in the heartes of poetes’ of which the old naturalist wrote. There have been days of peace this year, and of the whole beauty of Summer-end. In the isles, among the hills, on forest lands and uplands, and by the long plains and valleys ofthe south, the September blue—which is part a flame of azure and part a haze of the dust of pearls—has lain over land and sea like a benediction. How purple the western moors, what depths of floating violet and pale translucencies of amethyst on the transfigured mountains. What loveliness of pale blue mist in the hollows of quiet valleys; what richness of reds and ambers where the scarlet-fruited ash hangs over the unruffled brown pool; what profuse gold and ungathered amber where the yellow gorse climbs the hillside and the armies of the bracken invade every windy solitude. How lovely those mornings when the dew is frost-white and the gossamer is myriad in intricate interlacings that seem woven of aerial diamond-dust. What peace in that vast serenity of blue where not the smallest cloud is seen, where only seaward the gannet may hang immeasurably high like a winged star, or, above inland pastures, the windhover poise in his miraculous suspense.
But, alas, only ‘days.’ It has not been the September of the heart’s desire, of the poet’s dream. The advance-guard of the equinox has again and again come in force: the grey wind has wailed from height to height, and moaned among the woods. Even in the gardens the wall-fruits have hardly giventhe wonted rich warmth, though the apples have made a brave show. Yesterday there was a hush in the wind; a delicate frost lingered after a roseflusht dawn; and the inward light came out of the heather, the bracken and the gorse, out of the yellow limes and the amber planes and the changing oaks, and upon the hillside turned the great pine on the further crag into a column of pale gold and made the lichened boulders like the half-sunken gates of buried cities of topaz and jasper and chalcedony. But to-day vast masses of sombre cloud have been swung inland from the Atlantic, and the gale has the wild mournful sough that we look for in the dark months. It is in the firelight that one must recapture September. It lies hidden in that warm heart, amid the red and yellow flowers of flame: and in that other heart, which, also, has its ‘darke fyre,’ that heart in whose lands lit by neither sun nor moon are the secret glens where old dreams live again, and where the dreams of the hour are radiant in their new wonder and their new beauty.