AUTUMN ILL

Autumn ill and adored

You will die when the storm blows in the rose gardens

When snow will have fallen

In the orchards

Poor autumn

Die in whiteness and riches

Of snow and ripe fruit

While far up in the sky

Sparrowhawks glide

Over the foolish, dwarfish, greenhaired nymphs

Who have never loved

On the distant tree line

The stags have belled

And how I love—oh season—your murmurings

The fruit falling with no one to gather it

The wind and the forest weep

All their tears in autumn leaf by leaf

The leaves

We trample

The train

Rolls by

Life

Flows away

‘Autumn ill and adored’, autumn adored because of its illness, because of its mortality. Is not Apollinaire, the poet of the flux of time, of the death of love, also the poet of the love of death, of the love of time passing, of the love of love as the terrain par excellence of this frailty?

The poet addresses autumn to announce its destiny, its final hour. He is the vates, the soothsayer, who says to autumn that it has had its moment, that its time has come or at least will come soon. There follows a series of antitheses: the wind and roses, the snow and the orchard, winter and spring, death and youth. From the future (you will die) Apollinaire shifts into the future anterior(when snow will have fallen), the future accomplished, that is the future already past, the tense of prophecy, which speaks of the future as if it had already happened.

The spring, the roses, the rose garden. Spring is the season of innocence, of hope and fragility. Autumn is the season of transition and decline, when the midday sun begins to set; the frailest of seasons, the most temporal of times. The wind is the west wind dear to Debussy, the wind that brings death to the rose gardens, a violent wind (underlined by the alliteration of ‘r’). Petals that blow away, roses that lose their flowers, the poem is like a dramatized version of Ronsard's elegy. This image of violence is redoubled: the snow, a mortal whiteness, a cruel coldness, which burns and destroys silently, without a sound as it falls, comes to complete the brutal and sudden onslaught of the wind.