To Autumn

It is the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and time for a virtual walk among the memorials at Radnor Street Cemetery.  

Branches creak and the leaves are swept off the trees across the cemetery on the hill today.  Doesn’t the cemetery look beautiful in its Autumn finery? But then it always looks beautiful to me. I shall don my raincoat and carry an umbrella as the weather forecast is not good, but you can put on the kettle, make a cup of tea and join me from the comfort of your sitting room. The sun is shining and I’m wrapped up warmly, so off we go.

These photographs have been taken across a 20 year period. There have been some changes. Remembering Mark Sutton.

To Autumn by 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.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
  Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
  Steady thy laden head across a brook;
  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
    Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
  Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Written September 19, 1819 and first published in 1820.

Or you may like to join us on our last guided cemetery walk of 2024 today, Sunday 27. Meet at the cemetery chapel 1.45 for a 2pm start.