Statues - Seasons

(I asks what the trees dream of)


The leaves that they have cherished now fall down
Into a gently rotting golden veil
Which we draw over long and lazy days
And nights.
                         The sky is cloud-covered and stale,
As much as summer with its dying rays
Draws people out to bask while they still can
Like wasps, who always know when their time’s done,
And numb themselves accordingly.
                                                                       The span
Of ripeness given by the earth has come
And gone, by now the over-softened fruit
Lies festering, alive and waiting for
The frost to come and sterilise it –
                                                                     Moot
Whether the tiny lives on Warden’s Lawn^*
Approve of their impending vanishing;




But when the freezing comes there’s no such thing
As wondering if it was such a good
Idea to stay around, unlike the birds,
Whose hasty exit’s waved and understood
By John’s^* skeletal hands.
                                                     And all the words
They cry back will unfreeze on the cold air
In time, and when the sap stopped in the veins
Of every tree has thawed, they will prepare
To answer, in a dialogue it pains
Them to continue, age after slow age.


For now, though, in suspended animation
The sun shines weakly, watery, the page
Of Nature turned, though every new creation
Will still insist on turning out the same;




And suddenly, though you might think the flame
Of frozen winter, scorching the land cold
And barren to the eye, might never yield,


The last frost breaks. The sun shines strong and gold.
The world awakes. The creatures in the field
Forsake their lairs. The birds who had escaped
Come back with airs – Of course they couldn’t stay
Away from Meads^*! Who else would coo and prate
While some disease holds people in Sick Bay?


The freshest time of year, this, when the dawn
Smells all of growing, and the rain feels clean
On my face as I stand on Cat’s^*, forlorn
That it was cloudy when the sun rose, keen
To feel how shifting seasons’ winds are changing;




And now the sun looks on us, his gaze ranging
From tennis to exams sat in the dark.


At least, whenever he chooses to shine
On us, we can enjoy his warmth… The spark
That ignites the full summer comes in time
Some years, and others not – but that makes when
It does more special.
                                           Hot days come alive
And leisurely, relaxing Collegemen^*
Pretend to read, propped up against the hive
Of stones that exhale heat they’ve held for months,
And breathe in once again to arm themselves.


They feel the cooling coming, in amongst
The balmy breezes there’s a chill. It delves
Into the trees’ bark, tints their green with brown;




Warden's Lawn: A walled lawn in College, my boarding house at the time
John: The name given to one of the four huge trees on Meads (see below), which were named after the Evangelists.
Meads: The bigger lawn-type area just out of College, which had a football and cricket pitch on it.
Cat's: A hill crucially away from the school (though still owned by it) where I used to walk
Collegemen: The term for people from College.


Background


In the last year of school I decided to enter my house's creative writing competition. (I'm afraid I went to the type of school which has boarding houses and furniture older than Australia and tiresome Latin-based slang, not that you'd be able to tell by my faux-erudite style and Classics fixation.) To this end, I wrote a sonnet cycle based around College (my house), initially focusing on individual places, then moving on to wider topics, such as the seasons, as reproduced here. It didn't win anything, for one reason or another, but I'm proud of it as the first major-ish thing I've completed in a while. The only problem with it is that it's all by its nature rather College-specific; luckily the part I like the most is also the most generally appreciable (with the given notes), so there you are. The italicised parenthesis at the top is what carries over from the previous poem in the cycle. (I, by the way, is my convention for the narrator in my poems - probably not a coherent character.)


Technically


If it interests anyone, I wrote the sonnet cycle as a "big sonnet" - fourteen poems arranged into three quatrains and a volta. These four make up the third big quatrain. Whereas everywhere else in the cycle the poems are standard Shakespearian sonnets, here I went first for a cyclic rhyme scheme, as befits a seasonal description, and then broke with end-stopping quatrains - the sense flows on through line, stanza and even poem boundaries. This made the rhyming a lot easier... In general I try to make my rhymes as exact as possible, but in the context of a larger project like Statues or even in this sub-cycle I relaxed this a bit. It also meant I could get into building in themes and motifs - see if you can spot a Greek element in each season, for example. (That one wasn't deliberate, but there were a lot that were - and besides, if you do it by accident and leave it in, it becomes deliberate...)


Oh, and the metre's iambic pentameter. It's the first example I've posted here, but really my - and most of English formal verse's - default metre. On a small note, if you've got iambic pentameter down as five iambs in a line (random line, The fré|shest tíme | of yeár, | this, whén | the dáwn), you might be puzzled to see lines like "And nów the sún looks ón us, hís gaze ránging", which has an extra syllable at the end. It's called a feminine line (a term borrowed from French verse, where all feminine forms end in Es, giving an extra weak syllable as opposed to the masculine, of which make what you will), and can be used for metrical and rhyme variation in English, or more consistently in French and Russian verse, for example, where it's customary for masculine (hít/bít) and feminine (eáting/beáting) rhyming pairs to alternate. Look, Shakespeare does it! "To bé or nót to bé, that ís the quéstion." (Whether the stresses actually fall like that in real life is the subject for another post - but you get the idea for now.)


Links


Certainly not to the rest of Statues. You can probably find it online if you look hard enough - but then, you've brought it on yourself, and I'll not accept any resulting blame.


The linking sonnet thing is reminiscent of a corona (Latin for "crown"), a sort of sonnet daisy chain where the entire first and last lines are the same as the previous and next ones - sometimes people even make the last one up using all the repeated lines. John Donne did one in his later God phase called La Corona, detailing and praising the progress of Christ in a crown of seven sonnets. I personally prefer the earlier love poems, but that probably says more about me than Donne (said as Done - he once summed up his prospects to his wife in a letter with, "John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone").