Autumn and Summer

All autumn I have mourned the passing of summer, missing the feeling of warmth, the bright light, the long days and slow sunsets – signs of eternity. Only when autumn is nearly past do I admire it too.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote,

“The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past—there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!”

Surely Shelley is right : there is a harmony in autumn and a lustre in its sky.” Still, I wish he had not compared autumn with summer, nor even mentioned summer. The pronoun “it” in the phrase “is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been” must refer, I reassure myself, to “harmony in autumn, and a lustre in its sky, but appearing just after the word “summer,” my thoughts go back to summer. I miss summer.

I don’t want to think that summer “could not be.” On these cold wet days at the end of autumn it is indeed “as if it had not been.”