Summer's End

Wendell Berry - Sabbath Poems 1985 IV

(A Saturday extra)

If you live in the northern hemisphere, summer ends today and autumn begins (at least it does in my mind). For the longest time, since childhood in fact, I’ve found it to be the saddest part of the year. Other days might be bleaker but summer’s end is pretty dolorous. Its early hopes have faded fast, mostly unrealised. The evenings are failing; it’s dark before sleep. School is definitely no longer out. And what once felt expansive and full of opportunity has inexorably waned and closed, tight as a clam.¹

Which means it’s exactly the right moment to dig out this poem by Wendell Berry:

The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way. Our theme
Reversed, we harvest the last row
To store against the cold, undo
The garden that will be undone.
We grieve under the weakened sun
To see all earth's green fountains dried,
And fallen all the works of light.
You do not speak, and I regret
This downfall of the good we sought
As though the fault were mine. I bring
The plow to turn the shattering
Leaves and bent stems into the dark,
From which they may return. At work,
I see you leaving our bright land,
The last cut flowers in your hand.²

I feel a kinship there, since Berry also grieves “under the weakened sun” and testifies to the sad fact of “all earth’s green fountains dried”. But more alarming still is that “fallen are all the works of light” — is the end of summer really that disquieting?³ Are these days more than just woebegone? Is something deeply sinister at play?

Again, it can feel like that. The brightness shrouded and the clear skies wounded by the dark aptly portray the cosmic battle. The sun rising lower and lower brings with it a chill both real and emblematic of hope waning and defeat looming. With Berry we too can “regret / This downfall of the good we sought” and fear that the fault really does lie with us.

And yet all is not lost. The shattering leaves and bent stems are ploughed back into the earth, “into the dark”, in hope that from there “they may return”. Just as the last row has been harvested “to store against the cold” so too we look to harvest hope from the words of Jesus sufficient to see us through the biting cold of earth’s winter — that the seed which dies solitary in the ground will not abide alone, will discover life comes out of death by the saving and redeeming goodness of God through the planting of the Son.⁴

The final glance is of Berry’s wife, Tanya, leaving “our bright land”, her hands carrying “the last cut flowers”. Flowers that will also fade and fall, yes, but the “bright land” intimating a future not governed by decay nor defined by death. For which I, too, give thanks on this first day of autumn. As Berry accepts, “it is time”, God’s ordered time, his seasoned purpose ripening even in the hardening ground — “it is time / To face another way”, a way not lost to the governing wisdom of the God of all grace.

(You might want to also have a look at this piece and this one too.)

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Over in Bubbles That Squeak recently:

Ministry is about mysteries, not puzzles
Rising through the stack of the past

1. I agree, I really ought to try harder to enjoy all that is good about all the seasons.

2. ©️ Wendel Berry — Sabbath Poems 1985 IV

3. ‘Fallen’ of course is suggestive to American ears of the season we Brits call Autumn.

4. See John 12:23ff.