Questing for Wanwood

While driving this afternoon, I noticed the sunlight playing on a tree with bright yellow leaves. The leaves were riffling in a slight wind, and it was the kind of sight that could inspire poetry. A phrase concerning showers of gold ran through my head, but I left it there. It was enough just to see the tree in the light.

But you know how writers are: sometimes they just have to tinker. For the last few minutes, I've been trying to think of a word that describes the quality of this afternoon's light. Melancholy is too strong; pensive doesn't quite fit. It was a waning light, but glorious and tranquil. It invoked a wistful feeling, a sort of yearning mixed up with contentment to be out on such a beautiful day.

There are many notable poems about autumn, but Gerard Manley Hopkins' phrase "worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie" from "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" came to me as I was thinking about the trees and swirling leaves of my drive. That led to a realization that even though I've known the poem for 30 years, I don't actually know what wanwood is, so I looked it up. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that Hopkins might have coined the word, intending to evoke a forest in its decline.

The poem as a whole is heavier in mood than this afternoon's sunlit trees, but "worlds of wanwood" is just right to describe the drifts of leaves now blanketing yards and sidewalks all over town. I've always pictured wanwood as yellow -- I don't know whether Hopkins did, but this afternoon's palette was definitely in that key.

My search for wanwood led down another interesting byway. I found that -- along with generations of other students of Victorian poetry -- singer and songwriter Natalie Merchant was greatly moved by "Spring and Fall," adapting it to music for her 2010 album Leave Your Sleep. The poem's elegiac quality has never sounded more graceful than it does set to her plaintive melody. It's somber rather than wistful, more in line with a grayer day than today, but beautiful nonetheless.

Autumn is, after all, a time of shifting weather and moods. It shifts with the wind, from mellow to cold and wet, to brisk, to summery, and back again. It's a patchwork quilt of events.