Analysis

The poem opens with a typical October scene, wind in the trees ‘poplars’ and the sense of personification of a tree with a ‘dead arm’ the branch made to seem like a human arm, as if a person, injured. There are five polar trees trembling as if in fear of something, to reflect the wind blowing around them.

The focus moves to what appears to be a stone lion, a statue which goes darker in a shower, the alliteration of the ‘s’ sound in ‘sharp shower’ exaggerating the power of the sudden rain. The lion has ‘dreadlocks’ of lobelia, a flower that grows wild at this time, but is now brown in colour, rather than the blue colour it is in summer time. The brown colour making the lion seem more real.

The second stanza begins with the detail of a dead friend and in the graveyard at Orcop. There is the sad scene of the funeral with everyone’s faces ‘stony’ with the ‘rain weeping in the air’ personified as if sad at the scene of the funeral. The grave seems ‘deep as a well’ the simile reflecting how deep the grave seems to be and the fact that when we are dead there is darkness. ‘the earth’s thud’ is a reference to the throwing of dirt on to the coffin after it is lowered into the hole as a symbol of the person returning to the earth, from where they came.

The atmosphere reflects the sombre nature of the funeral. The third stanza is a reflection of Clarke’s writing process, with ‘the pen runs faster than wind’s white steps over grass’ further personification is used to describe the wind moving, giving it a colour to give it a clear identity as it moves across the grass. The idea of health feeling like pain perhaps reflects the grieving process for the loss of her friend, which she writes about.

There is a sense of panic that the writing must be done, ‘year after year’ beyond death when she is placed in the ground. The list of descriptive events, the fields, the grass, the leaves, the robin are all things which she associates with autumn. She must write about all these things before her time runs out too.