Just as October is almost past, so are my Autumn poems. For this week’s selection, I was unsure which poem/poet to feature, originally planning on “Autumn Daybreak” by Millay. But then I decided on a poem from America’s most famous and best-loved poets of the 19th century – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882).
The poem “Autumn Within” was included in one of the last books of poems published by Longfellow - “In the Harbor: Ultima Thule”(1882), which contained unpublished poems he had written over his life.
This poem does not necessarily focus on the yearly season, but an inward season Longfellow was going through at the time; we can only guess on the reason for his personal autumn.
Was it because of his grief over the death of his first wife Mary after a brief four years of marriage? Was it for sadness over the death of his father, brother, and mother in a two-year period in the mid-1800s?
Or was it a result of the death of his second wife Frances, when she suffered fatal burns in a fire, even though he himself after trying to extinguish the flames was left with severe facial sensitivities that precluded shaving thereafter and resulted in the now familiar white beard.
We do know that Longfellow was driven to write the poem that was the basis of the song “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” after his son Charles was wounded fighting for the Union Army in late 1862; could this also have been the reason for the “autumn within” Longfellow was suffering through?
We really don’t know what drove the words from Longfellow, but I find it interesting that the title of the collection containing the poem references “Ultima Thule,” which in literature is the furthest possible place in the world. Is that where Longfellow found himself and inspired “Autumn Within?”
We will never know.