October Surmise – An Irishman’s Diary about one of the year’s most poetic months

The northern hemisphere’s October is a favourite month for poets, even if they can’t quite make up their minds about it.

Thomas Wolfe (the poetic novelist one) thought it was a time for settling down: “All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds; the lover to the love he has forsaken.”

But William Bliss Carman suggested more or less the opposite: “There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;/ We must rise and follow her,/When from every hill of flame/She calls and calls each vagabond by name.”

Mind you, speaking of sailors, Christopher Columbus could offer both men some support. He was home at sea (in Wolfe’s paradox) around this time 524 years ago, while also a vagabond heading for new worlds. He landed in the Bahamas on October 12th, 1492.

Hints of mortality

Nearer home, Dylan Thomas had a special relationship with this month, having been born in it. His “Poem in October” is therefore a reflection on his 30th birthday, and also on memories of childhood.

But autumn brought him heavy hints of mortality too, as he “stood there then in the summer noon/Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.” And well it might. He would have only nine more birthdays.

Patrick Kavanagh was born this month too, and his eponymous tribute was written in his later years when, as he saw it, “it is October all over my life”. But the poem finds him now at ease with age, unlike his younger self, remembered from a long-gone October, already lamenting lost youth: “A man is ploughing ground for winter wheat/And my nineteen years weigh heavily on my feet.”

The number 19 also features in a poem Yeats set in this month, the one that opens: “The trees are in their Autumn beauty,/The woodland paths are dry”.

In his case, it wasn’t a birthday, but a different anniversary – that of a swan census he had first carried out in 1897, when he was 32 and miserably in love with Maud Gonne. He was now 51, and miserably in love with her daughter. In the circumstances, despite its beauty, October didn’t help his mood.

Of course, this time of year can also mark beginnings. It doesn’t always happen, but the arrival of October 2016 brings with it both the Jewish and Islamic New Years. And although less rigorously defined, the academic calendar also marks the year’s turning around now.

It was the risks and opportunities of the latter that poet and mystic Thomas Merton had in mind when he wrote: “October is a fine and dangerous season”. So Merton might have found it apt that in the Christian calendar, October 2nd is dedicated to guardian angels.

In the spirit of academia, however, Christianity probably cogged that whole idea from Roman mythology, which held that a man was guided from cradle to grave by a tutelary spirit called his “genius”. The female equivalent was “Juno”. But genii were a male preserve. In some versions, you had both a good genius and an evil one – an idea that also survived into Christianity.

Trumpets

Getting back to Judaism, new year (Rosh Hashannah) is also sometimes known as the “feast of trumpets”, because the faithful were urged to “make a noise” then, traditionally with a trumpet improvised from a sheep’s horn. And if not of the prescribed kind, there will be plenty of noise in the US this month, as the presidential candidates vie to spring – or avoid – an “October surprise”.

New Yorker

One of those candidates is so fond of blowing his own trumpet that his surname seems no accident. He is not, however, a known poetry enthusiast. So for that and other reasons, we will hardly hear him quoting Emma Lazarus this month, although she was a fellow New Yorker and, 130 years ago, gave the city several of its most famous phrases.

They were in a sonnet she recited at the dedication of the Statue of Liberty on October 28th , 1886. She died only a year later and, unlike her biblical namesake, has not been seen since.

But the poem’s last lines live on, now as an inscription below the statue: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”