You’ll love this extraordinary poem about autumn

Say goodbye to summer. We are now officially entering autumn. It’s all downhill from here (pumpkin spice lattes excepted) as the days get darker and colder. When I think of the fall, the first image that comes to mind is of leaves turning yellow, orange, and red, transforming entire hillsides into a riot of color. To me, it feels like being surrounded by burning bushes and the voice of God is echoing through the forest. It really is wonderful.

A little later in the season, though, things aren’t so majestic. The color drains from the leaves, which turn brown, dry out, and fall to the ground where they turn into a slimy mush. The sound of dry leaves rattling across the ground in the wind is the sound of winter approaching. There’s beauty in this last half of autumn, too, but it’s more melancholic. It’s the fragile beauty of summer passing away into the long, cold winter evening.

It’s no accident that poets, when thinking about autumn, often turn their thoughts to mortality. No image is more suited to meditations on mortality than a falling leaf. From living branch to the soil, from its place in the sun to the shadows beneath, a falling leaf is a symbol for the passing nature of our lives.

Every good poem has at its heart a simple image of some kind. Everything in creation is God-shaped and relates back to the Creator, and we are drawn through the beauty of sensible images into the greater beauty of the next world. The pictures in our minds that we hold precious are united to our memories, hopes, and dreams. The longer we sit with the image, the more it unfolds. Suddenly the image expands and, while remaining itself, it becomes so much more - a rose, a quiet pond, a mother holding a child, a loaf of bread, a cup of wine, a falling leaf.

In The Book of Images, published in 1902 and written by Rainer Maria Rilke, we find a series of meditations on images. Rilke’s poems are about learning to see. He looks below the surface level of things and pushes to the deeper meaning. Once, after looking at a marble statue in the art museum for a long time, Rilke wrote that a divine glow, “from all the borders of itself,/ burst like a star.” In other words, the image revealed its inner heart.

In order to connect more deeply with our existence, we must be patient and not pass these images by in our haste. So, on this first day of autumn, I thought we might linger with Rilke on the image of a falling leaf.

One of his poems in The Book of Images is simply titled, “Autumn.” Here it is in its entirety, in a translation by Jessie Lamont:

The leaves fall, fall as from far,
Like distant gardens withered in the heavens;
They fall with slow and lingering descent.
And in the nights the heavy Earth, too, falls
From out the stars into the Solitude.
Thus all doth fall. This hand of mine must fall
And lo! the other one: — it is the law.
But there is One who holds this falling
Infinitely softly in His hands.

The central image to the poem is simple. In the first stanza, Rilke describes watching leaves fall from the trees and he has the sad thought that they’re nothing more than the remnants of some heavenly garden. All the vibrancy of life is somewhere up above, out of reach. Even more melancholic, maybe Paradise itself is permanently damaged by our sins. The heavenly garden is dying, falling down, and we are being carried with those withered leaves to our own final, mortal end.

Rilke then thinks of the earth, “falling” through the blackness of space. It’s like a leaf that has dropped away from the branches, from the life of the stars and into the void. There is great solitude in this as we hurtle away from the light. The poet feels it, and we can almost picture him shivering.

In the last stanza, the image changes one final time: from the falling leaves to the falling earth, Rilke looks at his hands. They, too, are “falling.” Eventually, they will fall from life into death. Like the leaves falling from the trees, his hands will be laid to rest in the soil. Even now, he is in his own personal autumn.

If this is where the poem ended, it would be nothing more than a meditation on death, and Rilke a depressed poet morbidly ruminating on autumn as a symbol of decay. The poem doesn’t end here, though, because there are actually a pair of hands that never fall. They are held out to catch us and stop our falling. Even if we feel the pain of our mortality, even if we feel sometimes alone and frightened, there is love at the heart of the universe, a love stronger than death. We will never fall from the hands of God.

I cannot help but think back to a great image Our Lord provides; the image of the seed. Even as it falls into the earth and dies, the falling is a willing sacrifice made out of love and, by that sacrifice, the falling becomes the principle of life, a new garden where the trees will bloom and flower more brightly than ever.