In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Henry David Thoreau includes an autumn-inspired poem in "Friday," the book's final chapter, in which he and his brother, John, return to Concord after their two-week river trip in the late summer of 1839.
The poem reads:
The seasonal tones are clear: Thoreau's "race is run," "winter is lurking," and the natural world around him begins to wind down as the next season approaches.
The poem's sense of loss is understandable: less than three years after the brothers' river trip, John died of tetanus after cutting his finger while shaving. He was only 27.
When A Week was finally published in 1849, nearly a decade had passed since their journey, and more than seven years since John’s unexpected death. The book—a winding, river-like meditation on grief, myth, and history—became Henry's memorial to his brother.
Right after the poem, Thoreau does something curious.
He writes:
To an unskilful 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 golden-rods reign along the way, and the life-ever-lasting 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 for ever, annually watering and maturing it, and man never severs the stalk which bears this palatable fruit.
While Thoreau's poem centers on loss, the "Muse" that follows reminds him—the "unskilful rhymer"—that not everything is as it seems.
The fields have been cut down, sure, but something remains: "the true harvest of the year," something already at work on the next phase of life and growth, even if Thoreau, as a human poet, can't see it.
Like Thoreau as poet, I'd argue we're often unskilled interpreters of what we see and experience. We go through change, we judge it, and we label it from a naturally human point of view, but one that's unavoidably narrow in scope.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, understanding well this limitation in perspective, instructs readers to "adopt the pace of Nature."
"Her secret is patience," he writes.
Thoreau's framing of the human poet, who sees loss and grief, against the Muse of nature, which sees continuation, reminds us that we don't always know what a season of our lives is really producing while we're still in it.
The season is not the whole story, even when it feels like it on the surface.
Consider: Where might you be an "unskilled" interpreter of something in your life? What might this season of your life be producing that you can't see yet?
Last week: The hidden path