Autumn and love

Love appeared suddenly and never moved away. Well, that's my life in a nutshell. My favourite time of year is autumn. The leaves fall. There's a stillness before the storm in the air.

William Shakespeare in his Sonnet No. 73 compared the autumn of ones life to yellow leaves shaking against the cold, making love stronger for what must soon pass.

Of course, Shakespeare's autumn represents the speaker's advancing old age, the loss of physical vitality, and the approach of death. But is there anything else to feel and experience?

The poem's final couplet turns on a paradox, because in this autumn of ones life the beloved's affection is made even stronger and more precious because their time together will be limited from now on.

Shakespeare looks at bare, shaking boughs, equating the loss of leaves directly with the fading of his own youth and body. The mood is melancholy, intimate, and haunted by the coming "black night".

Is there any hope left? Someone like the Czech poet Rilke views autumn not merely as destruction, but as a moment of heavy, concentrated fulfillment.

Autumn, by Rainer Maria Rilke

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

The closing comfort isn't triumphal. It’s not that we stop falling; it’s that the fall is contained within tenderness. Pointing to what makes us really want to continue the journey?

Anyhow, the question that the poem seems to ask is: is it solitude itself what those hands hold? Meaning that the loneliness is real, but not ultimate.

Rilke’s final image doesn’t explain suffering away; it might be felt less as an answer than as a touch.