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Autumn, also known as fall in American English and Canadian English, is one of the four temperate seasons on Earth. Outside the tropics, autumn marks the transition from summer to winter, in September (Northern Hemisphere) or March (Southern Hemisphere). Autumn is the season when the duration of daylight becomes noticeably shorter and the temperature cools considerably. Day length decreases and night length increases as the season progresses until the Winter Solstice in December (Northern Hemisphere) and June (Southern Hemisphere). One of its main features in temperate climates is the striking change in colour for the leaves of deciduous trees as they prepare to shed.
- It was autumn, and he always liked autumn. Something about early autumn, when the leaves began to flee before a northern breeze and the days shortened, gave an extra edge to existence.
- Brian Aldiss, Steppenpferd, in David G. Hartwell (ed.) Year's Best SF 6, p. 310 (Originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, February 2000)
- falling leaves
hide the path
so quietly- John Bailey, Autumn, a haiku year, 2001.
- Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), Book VII.
- What does winter or autumn or spring or summer know of memory. They know nothing of memory. They know that seasons pass and return. They know that they are seasons. That they are time. And they know how to affirm themselves. And they know how to impose themselves. And they know how to maintain themselves. What does autumn know of summer. What sorrows do seasons have. None hate. None love. They just pass.
- Giannina Braschi, Empire of Dreams (1988)
- If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It's a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it's time to reflect on what's come before.
- Mitchell Burgess, Northern Exposure (Thanksgiving, 1992).
- The mellow autumn came, and with it came
The promised party, to enjoy its sweets.
The corn is cut, the manor full of game;
The pointer ranges, and the sportsman beats
In russet jacket;—lynx-like is his aim;
Full grows his bag, and wonderful his feats.
Ah, nutbrown partridges! Ah, brilliant pheasants!
And ah, ye poachers!—'Tis no sport for peasants.- Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto XIII, Stanza 75.
- Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.
- Albert Camus, as quoted in Visions from Earth (2004) by James R. Miller, p. 126.
- October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came -
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band.- George Cooper, October's Party.
- Friends are like the autumn, every year they leaving.
- DaBaby, in "Enemies", by Post Malone, Hollywood's Bleeding (2019)
- To me there is no season so lovely as the autumn. There is a gayety about the spring with which I have no sympathy: its perpetual revival of leaf and bloom is too great a contrast to the inner world, where so many feelings lie barren, and so many hopes withered. There is an activity about it, from which the wearied spirits shrink; and a joyousness, which but makes you turn more sadly upon yourself; but about autumn there is a tender melancholy inexpressibly soothing ; decay is around, but such is in your own heart. There is a languor in the air which encourages your own, and the poetry of memory is in every drooping flower and falling leaf. The very magnificence of its Assyrian array is touched with the light of imagination : even while you watch it, it passes away as your brightest hopes have done before.
- Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Ethel Churchill (or The Two Brides) (1837), Vol. I, Chapter 11
- For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.
- Edwin Way Teale, Autumn Across America.
- Crown'd with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf,
While Autumn, nodding o'er the yellow plain,
Comes jovial on.- James Thomson, The Seasons, Autumn (1730), line 1.
- To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season——delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
- Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903), Chapter VI
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
- Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 51-53.
- Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods,
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt,
And night by night the monitory blast
Wails in the key-hole, telling how it pass'd
O'er empty fields, or upland solitudes,
Or grim wide wave; and now the power is felt
Of melancholy, tenderer in its moods
Than any joy indulgent Summer dealt.- William Allingham, Day and Night Songs, Autumnal Sonnet.
- O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou mayest rest
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.- William Blake, To Autumn, Stanza 1.
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— Mitchell Burgess
- Autumn wins you best by this, its mute
Appeal to sympathy for its decay.- Robert Browning, Paracelsus, scene 1.
- Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson,
Yet our full-leaved willows are in their freshest green.
Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing
With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.- William Cullen Bryant, Third of November.
- The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear.- William Cullen Bryant, The Death of the Flowers.
- All-cheering Plenty, with her flowing horn,
Led yellow Autumn, wreath'd with nodding corn.- Robert Burns, Brigs of Ayr, line 221.
- Yellow, mellow, ripened days,
Sheltered in a golden coating;
O'er the dreamy, listless haze,
White and dainty cloudlets floating;
Winking at the blushing trees,
And the sombre, furrowed fallow;
Smiling at the airy ease,
Of the southward flying swallow.
Sweet and smiling are thy ways,
Beauteous, golden Autumn days.- Will Carleton, Autumn Days.
- A breath, whence no man knows,
Swaying the grating weeds, it blows;
It comes, it grieves, it goes.
Once it rocked the summer rose.- John Vance Cheney, Passing of Autumn.
- I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;—
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,
Pearling his coronet of golden corn.- Thomas Hood, Ode, Autumn.
- The Autumn is old;
The sere leaves are flying;
He hath gather'd up gold,
And now he is dying;—
Old age, begin sighing!- Thomas Hood, Autumn.
- The year's in the wane;
There is nothing adorning;
The night has no eve,
And the day has no morning;
Cold winter gives warning!- Thomas Hood, Autumn.
- 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-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.- John Keats, To Autumn.
- Third act of the eternal play!
In poster-like emblazonries
"Autumn once more begins today"—
'Tis written all across the trees
In yellow letters like Chinese.- Richard Le Gallienne, The Eternal Play.
- It was Autumn, and incessant
Piped the quails from shocks and sheaves,
And, like living coals, the apples
Burned among the withering leaves.- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Pegasus in Pound.
- What visionary tints the year puts on,
When falling leaves falter through motionless air
Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone!
How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,
As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills
The bowl between me and those distant hills,
And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!- James Russell Lowell, An Indian Summer Reverie.
- Every season hath its pleasures;
Spring may boast her flowery prime,
Yet the vineyard's ruby treasures
Brighten Autumn's sob'rer time.- Thomas Moore, Spring and Autumn.
- Autumn
Into earth's lap does throw
Brown apples gay in a game of play,
As the equinoctials blow.- Dinah Craik, October.
- Sorrow and the scarlet leaf,
Sad thoughts and sunny weather;
Ah me! this glory and this grief
Agree not well together!- Thomas William Parsons, A Song for September.
- Ye flowers that drop, forsaken by the spring,
Ye birds that, left by summer, cease to sing,
Ye trees that fade, when Autumn heats remove,
Say, is not absence death to those who love?- Alexander Pope, Pastorals, Autumn, line 27.
- Thus sung the shepherds till th' approach of night,
The skies yet blushing with departing light,
When falling dews with spangles deck'd the glade,
And the low sun had lengthened every shade.- Alexander Pope, Pastorals, Autumn, last lines.
- O, it sets my heart a clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.- James Whitcomb Riley, When the Frost is on the Punkin.
- This sunlight shames November where he grieves
In dead red leaves, and will not let him shun
The day, though bough with bough be overrun.
But with a blessing every glade receives
High salutation.- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Autumn Idleness.
- The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying;
And the year
On the earth her deathbed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Autumn, A Dirge.
- Cold autumn, wan with wrath of wind and rain,
Saw pass a soul sweet as the sovereign tune
That death smote silent when he smote again.- Algernon Charles Swinburne, Autumn and Winter, I.
- Autumn has come;
Storming now heaveth the deep sea with foam,
Yet would I gratefully lie there,
Willingly die there.- Esaias Tegnér, Fridthjof's Saga, Ingeborg's Lament.
- How are the veins of thee, Autumn, laden?
Umbered juices,
And pulpèd oozes
Pappy out of the cherry-bruises,
Froth the veins of thee, wild, wild maiden.
With hair that musters
In globèd clusters,
In tumbling clusters, like swarthy grapes,
Round thy brow and thine ears o'ershaden;
With the burning darkness of eyes like pansies,
Like velvet pansies
Where through escapes
The splendid might of thy conflagrate fancies;
With robe gold-tawny not hiding the shapes
Of the feet whereunto it falleth down,
Thy naked feet unsandalled;
With robe gold-tawny that does not veil
Feet where the red
Is meshed in the brown,
Like a rubied sun in a Venice-sail.- Francis Thompson, A Corymbus for Autumn, Stanza 2.
- We lack but open eye and ear
To find the Orient's marvels here;
The still small voice in autumn's hush,
Yon maple wood the burning bush.- John Greenleaf Whittier, Chapel of the Hermits.
| Seasons |
| Spring · Summer · Autumn · Winter |
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