Henry David Thoreau (1849)
"I am the autumnal sun" was originally published in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in 1849. It appears in “Friday,” the book’s final chapter, and is one of the last poems to appear in what was Thoreau's first book.
Thoreau introduces the poem with a prose passage:
Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature,—not his Father but his Mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her immortality. From time to time she claims kindredship with us, and some globule from her veins steals up into our own.
I am the autumnal sun,
With autumn gales my race is run;
When will the hazel put forth its flowers,
Or the grape ripen under my bowers?
When will the harvest and the hunter's moon
Turn my midnight into mid-noon?
I am all sere and yellow,
And to my core mellow.
The mast is dropping within my woods,
The winter is lurking within my moods,
And the rustling of the withered leaf
Is the constant music of my grief.
After the poem, Thoreau's prose continues:
To an unskillful rhymer the Muse thus spoke in prose:—
The moon no longer reflects the day, but rises to her absolute rule, and the husbandman and hunter acknowledge her for their mistress. Asters and goldenrods reign along the way, and the life-everlasting withers not. The fields are reaped and shorn of their pride, but an inward verdure still crowns them. The thistle scatters its down on the pool, and yellow leaves clothe the vine, and naught disturbs the serious life of men. But behind the sheaves, and under the sod, there lurks a ripe fruit, which the reapers have not gathered, the true harvest of the year, which it bears forever, annually watering and maturing it, and man never severs the stalk which bears this palatable fruit.
The poem was never formally titled "I am the autumnal sun." Rather, its first line has been used as its title in anthologies and collections since its original publication in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
Sources & Further Reading
Thoreau, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Introduction and notes by H. Daniel Peck. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.