Slowly, Slowly, October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
To-morrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
To-morrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow,
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know;
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away;
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost--
For the grapes' sake along the wall.

~Robert Frost

Every now and then you come across a poem that gives you a framework by which you process a certain time in your life. During my trip to Armenia over the summer, Cavafy's poem "Ithaca" provided that framework. Now I've moved on to this poem by Frost.

It's no wonder, really, that this poem has captivated me so. It captures that feeling you get when you realize that, although you are standing very still, time is sweeping by like the wind that pulls the autumn leaves from the trees. Try as you'd like, you can't catch it, and its swiftness--while exhilarating--is excruciating. Adding to the allure of this poem is the delicious, elusive sense of what Lewis called "the Idea of Autumn." Fall is my favorite season: I love the cool snap in the air, the sharp blue sky, the vibrant colors, and the smell of bonfires that hangs in the air on certain days. I love the sense that the approach of the holidays is quickening. Somehow, though fall is typically thought of as an end, it always carries the brisk excitement of a beginning. So many good things have happened, for me, in October. Don't get me wrong, a lot of yucky things have happened in October too, but overwhelmingly my associations with it are good.

This October, for instance, has been fantastic. I'm so glad I came to England in the fall, because my seasonal exuberance has only compounded with my love of being over here. Last week I got back from five days in Scotland, which was one ridiculously fun adventure (that you will have to ask me about if you want to hear the story, because it would take entirely too long to do the trip justice here). Tonight, to celebrate Halloween, we're going to take a spooky tour of Oxford Castle--which is literally a five-minute walk from our houses--and sometime this weekend we'll be carving pumpkins, which I bought today at the Covered Market. I'm feeling very festive.

But I'm also feeling very torn. November starts on Tuesday, and my last day of term is December third. Two months didn't seem so long; one month seems even less. It's not that I feel as though time has been going especially quickly. Every day has been full to bursting, one way or another; I don't think I've had a single day where the time has gone quickly for the simple reason that I wasted it. (Hence my infrequent blog postings: I've been too busy.) It's just that I'm coming to realize what all those adults I didn't want to believe said I would realize: that we don't have nearly as much time as we thought we did when we were children. Two months seems like a short time because it is.

I'm not ready to say goodbye to the fall-ripe leaves, the crows, or grapes clustered on the wall. I'm not ready to say goodbye to all of this. Luckily, I don't have to just yet. I still have time, though from where I'm sitting it doesn't look like much. And I hesitate to say that I wish I had more time, because I now have one or two more reasons to want to get home quickly than I did when I first arrived.

Instead, I ask like Frost for October--and November, and December--to beguile me. Make it seem slow, since nothing anyone can do can make time pass at a different pace. Let me make the most of it: let me go where I haven't, learn what I don't yet know, and strike my roots as deep as I can before I have to pull them out.

"Slow, slow! For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
...For the grapes' sake along the wall."