It’s been such a gorgeous autumn this year here in West Michigan, temperate and luminous and providing every excuse to escape outdoors. There’s never a year when I don’t relish this, my favorite season.
But maybe, like me, you’ve felt like this year was a lot: because of busy-ness and a million demands; because of endless political texts on your phone and ugly flyers in your mailbox; because of the state of the world, domestically and internationally. So much is broken. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a duty to engage, seriously and deliberately.
Nevertheless, autumn’s witness lies in its proclamation of how much beauty God grants us in that brokenness, in that seasonal decay. It feels like a gift of hope, a way to nourish the soul.
I’m not the only one who thinks so. Over the years, I’ve shared a number of really good autumn poems from Keats and Mary Oliver and Christina Rossetti. So here’s another from Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Millay’s classic sonnet is certainly feeling its feelings (an editor today might have disallowed quite so many exclamation points), but I actually adore the poem’s unapologetic embrace of emotion. It models unembarrassingly an engagement with the creation that seems miles away from our own inhibitions.
Even more, I’m challenged by the poem’s final assertion that we are “stretcheth [ ] apart” when we love God’s world fiercely.
But that seasonal stretching is the point: the more we understand the immense beauty of God’s creation (including all God’s creatures), the more we understand the depth of the sacrifice of the God broken open because God so loved that world.
Lord, stretch us, indeed.
God’s World
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
