Now in the last few weeks of autumn and with the festive season rearing it’s antlered head and the distant sound of sleigh bells ringing, you might be in danger of forgetting there’s an important season in between summer and winter that you just might have missed. Check out our London in Autumn feature.
Poems – London in Autumn
To Autumn (John Keats)
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
To Autumn (William Blake)
To Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou mayst rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.
The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head.
Photos – London in Autumn
Little Venice by Nikolay Dimitrov, Unsplash
London in Autumn by Nicolas J Leclercq, Unsplash
Quotes – London in Autumn
“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” George Eliot, novelist
“No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.” Samuel Johnson, poet, playwright, essayist.
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves…” Virginia Woolf, member of the Bloomsbury Set of English writers.
Art – London in Autumn
And, of course, the Bloomsbury-based Pre Raphaelite artists were inevitably influenced by the seasonal changes in their capital city.
Autumn Leaves, John Everett Millais
