Autumn is my favorite season—perhaps for the same reason I prefer music in a minor key. The trees’ colorful display seems especially fleeting in contrast to the upcoming winter death and darkness. Wallace Stevens deftly captures this melancholy in his 1932 poem, “Autumn Refrain.” I have loved this meditative but enigmatic poem all my life, though I never really understood it. To me, it beautifully captures the emptying out of color, warmth, light, and birdsong presaged by autumn. So, it’s time to try to crack this enigma.
The “skreak and skritter of evening gone” in the first line of the poem establishes a harsh and melancholy tone with its repeated k and t sounds. These neologisms may mimic the sound made by grackles, and/or might be a gloomy echo of the “bleat” of lambs and “twitter” of swallows in Romantic poet John Keats’ ode “To Autumn” (Crozet Gazette, September, 2011). Stevens was a deep admirer of Keats (1795-1821) and shared his belief in the power of the imagination, including allusions in a number of other poems, such as “Sunday Morning.” “Autumn Refrain” itself makes allusions, and might even be seen as a response, to Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” Since the nightingale sings at night, and the evening is gone, the poet must be writing at dusk or later, adding to the gloominess of the mood. The poem’s 15 lines of sometimes irregular iambic pentameter tell us that “Autumn Refrain” is a modified sonnet. It might be classified as a Shakespearean sonnet, but with 13 lines of argument followed by a summary couplet.
The poet in “Autumn Refrain” feels a deep sense of loss, which his words create in us as well. The noisy grackles are gone, along with the “sorrows of the sun” and the nightingale—which was never present in reality anyway. “Sorrows of the sun” evokes small daily tragedies. In line 9 the poet laments “everything gone.” The monotonous repetition—the sun’s sorrows, the moon, stillness, and the nightingale itself—emphasizes this sense of mourning and, like a chant or litany, creates a solemn mood. The poem frequently uses alliteration, especially with the “s” sound: skreaking, skittering, sorrows, sun, sitting, and stillness. The poem’s inherent music derives as well from assonance (sitting still, gone/sorrow), and consonance (sun/gone/moon, sorrow/yellow). “The yellow moon of words about the nightingale” is a direct reference to Keats’ ode with its “measureless measures”—an oxymoron implying frustration but also transcendent beauty—and its “Queen Moon” who lights the bird’s way. “The moon and moon”—perhaps my favorite line in the poem—keens a lament of its own. Keats contrasts the ecstatic song of the nightingale with his own dull, earthly life, whereas Stevens starts with the dullness and seeks something new to replace it.
Despite these numerous absences, we hear—along with the poet—the imagined song of the nightingale. For Keats, the nightingale represents beauty and sweetness as it “singest of summer” (which is also gone). For Stevens, it represents the power of the imagination to overcome the repeated fact that “I have never—shall never hear that bird,” covering past, present, and future in complete eradication. Since the poet has never seen a nightingale either, he highlights the fact that this is “not a bird for me” so he has to rely on words instead: the “name of the bird” and its “nameless air,” or song. Stevens, of course, did not have the benefit of the internet, which can now reproduce any bird call we request. In my opinion, our closest native bird to the nightingale’s song is the flute-like call of the wood thrush. There is an air of regret, even resentment, for the Romantic glorification of nature.
In spite of the poem’s overall bleak tone, the poet introduces a note of hope with the turn of the argument in line 7. “And yet,” he counters, this lack of direct experience does not lead to pure emptiness and loss, because “beneath the stillness” of never having heard a nightingale sing, “something resides.” This “residuum… grates these evasions of the nightingale.” The word “grates” means it challenges these absences, and refers to the grackles’ ugly “skreaking and skrittering” in contrast to the ultimately “desolate” song of the nightingale. “Evasions” refers to both the poet’s inability to physically hear its song, as well as its “plaintive anthem” eventually fading to a distant valley in Keats’ ode. The four-times-repeated “stillness” is comforting, echoing the silence of the imagined birdsong. The poem ends with a mood similar to Keats’ at the end of “Ode to a Nightingale”—forlorn and dreamlike, but nevertheless blessed. This poem is not an ode, but rather a refrain—suggesting that all the lost things will eventually be restored.
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is one of America’s most respected 20th century poets, known best for poems such as “Emperor of Ice Cream” and “Sunday Morning.” He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania and educated at a parochial school. After attending Harvard—where he became editor of the Harvard Monthly—he worked as a journalist for the New York Evening Post and became friends with fellow poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. After graduating from the New York Law School and passing the bar, he worked as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut for most of his adult life, becoming vice president in 1934—yet writing all the time. He published seven volumes of poems. The 1955 publication of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens earned him the Pulitzer Prize for poetry as well as a second National Book Award. In 1975, Stevens’ daughter Holly donated his manuscripts and letters to the Huntington Library in San Merino, California, and led to the founding of the Wallace Stevens Society, which publishes newsletters and a journal.
Stevens’ influence on modern poetry is profound. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry declares that “Stevens, a near-contemporary of [Robert] Frost, brings into modern poetry a Keatsian color in contrast with Frost’s Wordsworthian plainness.” Stevens defined poetry as the “supreme fiction,” and contended that the poet’s purpose was to interpret the external world of thought and feeling through the imagination. “[He] held that, in a time when religion no longer could satisfy men, poetry must replace it.” This philosophy is especially developed in “Sunday Morning,” “in which cyclical nature is proposed as the sole alternative to Christianity in the theologically bankrupt 20th century” (poetryfoundation.org).
Stevens’ beautiful but challenging early poem is about the power of words, poetry, and artistic expression in general, to influence our emotions and state of mind, as well as the power of imagination to transport and fulfill us. The final lines offer an oxymoron: stillness/silence as the musical key of sound. “The stillness…all of it” is the key, or foundation, of the sound of the absent but imagined nightingale. In other words, through our imaginations we can shape our own thoughts and feelings. In the face of autumn’s bleak emptiness, through “being and sitting still” in both body and mind, we, along with the poet, find comfort and calm.
Autumn Refrain
by Wallace Stevens
The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone… the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never—shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness that comes to me out of this, beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never—shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.
