Here we are again. That outer edge of summer, tipping over into autumn. Blond grass over the hills. Breezes gradually taking on leaves. Foliage going bronze. Blackberries. It always seems like a goodbye.
Shel Silverstein understood this:
Changing Of The Seasons
Shel Silverstein – Changing of the Seasons from Crouchin’ on the Outside*
Oh the changing of the seasons it’s a pretty thing to see
And though I find this balmy weather pleasin’
There’s the wind come from tomorrow and I hear it callin’ me
And I’m bound for the changing of the seasons
Oh it’s blowin’ in Chicago and it’s snowin’ up in Maine
And the Islands to the south are warm and sunny
And I’ve got to feel the earth shake and I gotta feel the rain
And I’ve got to know a taste of more than honey
So don’t ask me where I’m goin’ or how long I’m gonna be away
Don’t make me give you all the hollow reasons
I’ll think of you like summer and I might be back some day
When my heart miss the changing of the seasons
Oh it’s blowin’ in Chicago…
Oh it’s nothing that you said and it ain’t nothing that you done
And I wish I could explain you why I’m leavin’
But there’s some men need the winter and there’s some men need the sun
And there’s some men need the changing of the seasons
Yeah it’s blowin’ in Chicago…
We live perpetually on the margins of a changing wilderness of weather. Even in the places where the climate varies little, subtle changes heave and smooth the life within us and around us. And often our stories so often arrive or depart with a change in the weather.
Like countless tales, the old faerie ballad of Thomas the Rhymer begins in weather as well:
It was one of those dismal autumn nights, with the wind whistling like a mad huntsman calling up the Hounds of Hell, and you know there’s rain toward. And sure enough it came, battering at the roof and shutters, and not a little down the chimney so the fire smoked up the place.
. . .
My Meg looks up. “Oh, Gavin,” she says, her voice strong against the noise of storm. “Gavin it’s a night for the dead to ride, and no mistake.”
. . .
“The Wild Hunt rides tonight.” Meg’s eyes glinted with her eerie tale. “They ride on hoses with nostrils like burning coals, chasing the souls of the wicked, that cannot rest for–” Then her head came up sharp. And “Gavin,” she says, there’s knocking at the door.”**
Naturally, in the tale (which is much older than Kushner’s retelling of it) there is indeed someone at the door, as the outer reflects the inner. Tales may be like the weather themselves, prevailing patterns in the winds or clouds that manifest in tone, in pace, in character, or in the movement of words across the page, and across the inner world of our brewing minds. Stormfronts may set birds crying on the darkest nights, or breezes may die away, yielding to enormous winds that may flatten all that stands upon the earth.
Shakespeare borrowed from such patterns as we all do. Plays like Macbeth and Othello feature a sound of knocking at the door. The title of today’s post comes from Love’s Labour’s Lost, from a story so familiar that it must have ached in Shakespeare’s day–a tale of four young men who swear away the company of women in order to devote themselves to three years of fasting and the most strict and diligent study. We feel the result of such an oath in our bones long before it arrives. Like coming rain, we know that such an oath, boldly framed to front the coming tale, will inevitably fail.
The title line is spoken by the clever Berowne, finishing out a rhyme begun by his friend, Ferdinand, who is the King of Navarre. The King chides Berowne for criticising the plan to devote themselves wholly to study and fasting for three years. “O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep,/ Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep” (LLL 1.1.48-9). Feeling that the oaths will prove too difficult, and also that swearing in this way pointlessly denies life’s natural order, which to him encompasses female company, dining, and ample rest. Berowne argues with his friends in verse:
KING
(1.1.104-13)
Berowne is like an envious sneaping frost
That bites the firstborn infants of the spring.
BEROWNE
Well, say I am. Why should proud summer boast
Before the birds have any cause to sing?
Why should I joy in any abortive birth?
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows,
But like of each thing that in season grows.
So you, to study now it is too late,
Climb o’er the house to unlock the little gate.
Seems fair enough, and the King readily, and curtly dismisses him. But for all his pot stirring, Berowne protests that because he has already sworn to the conditions, he is also willing to sign his name to the oath on paper, and he does so. Upon reading through the articles again, only a few lines later, Berowne points out their doom in more particular terms:
BEROWNE
(1.1.131-44)
A dangerous law against gentility.
[Reads] Item, If any man be seen to talk with a
woman within the term of three years, he shall endure
such public shame as the rest of the court can possible
devise.
This article, my liege, yourself must break,
For well you know here comes in embassy
The French king’s daughter with yourself to speak—
A maid of grace and complete majesty—
About surrender up of Aquitaine
To her decrepit, sick, and bedrid father.
Therefore this article is made in vain,
Or vainly comes th’ admirèd princess hither.
KING
What say you, lords? Why, this was quite forgot.
Certain kinds of weather, in certain spheres of life, when on the near horizon may spell damnation.
But Shakespeare used the weather more specifically as well. As Tillyard said, “they [the ‘Elizabethans’, as he called them] saw in nature allegorical pictures of human states of mind”.*** Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare’s The Tempest opens with a shipwreck in a great storm that reflects tumult on multiple levels. Prospero’s mental and spiritual unease echoes the disquiet of the native denizens on the island where the play is set, as well as the unstable nature of more distant political structures that his brother and confederates have constructed over the years since they usurped Prospero’s dukedom.
The aftermath of the initial storm reverberates throughout the play, permeating not just the physical setting but also the tone. The previous storm, that of the usurpation, is repeatedly echoed too, as ideas of obedience and rebellion are repeatedly questioned and reformed. After the shipwreck, Trinculo, who is jester to the King of Naples, wanders the beach lamenting:
TRINCULO
(The Tempest 2.2.18)
Here’s neither bush nor shrub to bear off
any weather at all. And another storm brewing; I
hear it sing i’ th’ wind.
Yet, Trinculo’s coming storm does not take the same form as the first. New storms arise in the form of Caliban’s revolt against Prospero (who enslaved Caliban after the former tried to mate with his daughter), and also in the form of a new romance between Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, and the King of Naples’ son, Ferdinand. In addition, a tempest simmers over the eventual confrontation between Prospero and his usurping brother, reflecting the seething turmoil within Prospero himself about how to juggle responsibility and revenge.
It is a complicated play, but like the play’s inherently changeable weather, Prospero’s revenge eventually transfigures into forgiveness before the audience’s eyes. By the end, as Alonso, the King of Naples, asks for Prospero’s full story, Prospero gives his final instructions to the bound spirit, Ariel, to bring good weather for the voyage home. The final lines before the epilogue distinctly marry the ideas of narrative and weather as Prospero sets Ariel free.
ALONSO
(5.1.370-8)
I long
To hear the story of your life, which must
Take the ear strangely.
PROSPERO
I’ll deliver all,
And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales,
And sail so expeditious that shall catch
Your royal fleet far off. [Aside to Ariel] My Ariel,
chick,
That is thy charge. Then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well.
In addressing Ariel, Prospero still uses ‘thy’ and ‘thou’ (a more familiar, less formal form of address than your or you–more often used to address those of equal or somewhat lower social status), but his wishes also seem heartfelt as he draws calm, auspicious weather to end his story, and returns his efficacious spirit servant to the elements where he apparently belongs.
The Tempest is hardly the only example. Storms in Julius Caesar, King Lear, and in Macbeth, Hamlet, Pericles, are only the tip of the iceberg, with Dr. Gwilym Jones telling us that “there is some instance of storm in every Shakespearean play”.**** Some of these references appear obliquely, in metaphor, in bits of character speech or presentation. Others, like in The Tempest above, are more central and direct. All of them serve to remind us how central the weather is to our lives and our perceptions of the world around us.
Whether bees in their quarter, humming from forest ridges on a summer’s day, or old Wang Wei laments the autumn and all that it suggests, the only constant in our human surroundings is change. Bees gather from blossom and from field while weather fends other weather off. But in many places, even now, the colder weather will come again.
Huazi Ridge
Huazi Ridge, from Wang Wei’s Wang River Collection, translated by Peter Harris.
Birds fly away to the ends of the earth;
The mountains have an autumn look again.
Going up Huazi Ridge, and coming down,
I am moved by feelings of the utmost sorrow.
But once we have abandoned literature and the arts, once we let slip our understanding of days and nights, of storms, springs, and autumns, who will notice? Who will recall our mild sunlit glory in the heat of ever advancing day? Who will still dare to eat a peach? Certainly not those who might have been confederates but did not choose to be. Those who, childlike, wrestling with a complicated toy, choose to discard their deeper reason into the teeth of fast images upon a screen, vapid entertainment sketched for monetary haystacks in the human field. Cyclones of the pound. Hurricane dollars vented to the circling winds.
How can we countenance the owl, the traditional messenger of death, even as we descend the steps to river’s edge? Our regency truncated by a growing trend of inattention. Waters swarm with the sea snakes of hatred, and reflections of intolerance fill the skies. Moon at wrong angles, still coming down. We sing the detritus of existence, dancing in rings beneath an expanding sun that will not let us go. All becomes the weather, constantly enfolding us.
Apparently, this is not how it used to be. “In Old English and other Germanic languages the sun is feminine: in the north, she is gentle, life-giving, nurturing; she does not burn the earth or strike folks to death.”***** My, my, how the weather changes. The heatwave of 2003 in Europe claimed some 15,000 lives in France alone and summer temperatures just seem to keep rising. Still, this is something of which the ghost has written previously.
At this juncture, what can we do? The ancient Chinese classic, the 大學 (Dà Xué) or Great Learning, says in part:
其本亂而末治者，否矣 (When the root [of matters] is neglected, what springs from it cannot be well ordered.)****** The key here is that, as in our perceptions of the weather, so much lies in ourselves. Rather than assign fault, as Cassius does, perhaps we should frame our thoughts and faiths, differently. The idea is not to change our faiths, but rather to invest in the kinder and more caring sides of those. Plant trees. Plant renewal and restoration on the land and in ourselves.
Unbreakable oaths, like those in Love’s Labour’s Lost, may become impediments, but perspectives seldom are. When we look to ‘proud summer’ as making a ‘boast’, we miss the gentle summer that begs us for mediation. When we think of vengeance, we often lose the compass of forgiveness. Violent weather may obscure the subtlety of patterns that lie beneath it.
As this post is being written, a massive category 5 hurricane, one of the strongest such storms in recorded history, is sweeping its way across the Bahamas. A few small changes in the atmosphere, the slowing of a northern low pressure system that may help divert it, will result in that storm making landfall in the U.S. state of Florida. The prospects are terrifying, and potentially devastating, not just for those in the Bahamas who have suffered the brunt of this ferocious storm and who will now suffer the economic and logistical aftermath, but also for those still waiting, and those who will lie in the path of whichever way it eventually turns.
In the end, we are not Prospero or Ariel. We cannot command the elements. We cannot avert life’s storms. But just as gentle weather accompanies ideas of forgiveness, kindness, and gentle embrace in literature, in our ideas, in most of our faiths, and in the great psyche of our collective consciousness, so may the changes in our own ideas result in something less polarised, less violent. We cannot remain silent in every situation, and although opposition also breeds contention, kindness may also find kind reception, even in disagreement. Finding ways to speak our pieces peacefully will, at the very least, not continue to feed the storm.
So may our gentle stewardship of our world command eventual changes in all the climates which may not be less profound. Intellectual, artistic, political, economic, and environmental realms do not really lie so far apart. Rather, they are mutually participating and deeply dependent upon one another. When one is sacrificed or minimised, the whole falls out of balance with the rest. Best to keep a weather eye out in all the ways we can, an eye that honours all we can. Best to help others do this too, spending as little energy as possible raging against unproductive, contrary scarecrows that stand alone in dry and barren fields. The world we save may be beneath our own feet. In fact, it is.
The Chinese classic of the Tao Te Ching says, 道常無為而無不為。(Tao abides without striving, leaving nothing undone.)******* This is not blind acceptance, but a different kind of resistance. Resistanceless, it is fighting that is not fighting. It remains the essence of teaching, of learning, and of reading and creating. It is also an idea that may still save our fast erupting world from burning or smothering itself.
*Silverstein won two grammy awards (and was also nominated for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award). Notably, he wrote the Johnny Cash hit, A Boy Named Sue, and The Cover of the Rolling Stone, which became a hit for Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show (for whom he wrote most of the songs). He also wrote Unicorn that was a great hit for the Irish Rovers. This song, Changing of the Seasons, from Shel Silverstein’s album, Crouchin’ on the Outside, may be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxsB2aksk9o
**Kushner, Ellen. Thomas the Rhymer. London: Victor Gollancz, 1991, p. 10-1. Kushner reworked older ballads of Thomas the Rhymer (perhaps ca. 1400 but condensed into the better known ballad form in the 1700s), into a modern retelling of the story of a balladeer or bard, a professional player/singer who is spirited away by the Faerie Queene.
***Tillyard, E.M.W. Myth and the English Mind. New York: Collier, 1962, p. 42.
****Jones, Gwilym. Shakespeare’s Storms. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016, p.2.
*****Herbert, Kathleen. Looking for the Lost Gods of England. Cambridge: Anglo-Saxon Books, 2010, p. 12.
******and*******are my rough translations. Please feel free, if so inclined, to suggest translations that you feel might be more accurate or more evocative of the texts.