Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-r5zm4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-15T17:30:03.757Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Apollinaire, Autumn Ill

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2020

Jeremy Ahearne
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
John Speller
Affiliation:
International Faculty of Engineering Lódz
Get access

Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Bourdieu and the Literary Field
Paragraph Volume 35, Number 1
, pp. 131 - 136
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×