According to the poets, autumn offers more than just mists and mellow fruitfulness. This is also a time for burning things. The artist and poet Edrica Huws had a single poem published in the TLS, "The Bonfire" (September 22, 1950); Howard Nemerov had at least one besides "Burning the Leaves" (November 6, 1959), "Zalmoxis", from five years earlier, which is concerned with the "soft / Suddenness" of spring. Both poems suggest that these are necessary communal rites, that the incineration of leaves, "old copy books" and "broken records" involves "higher stakes", as Nemerov puts it, than we might think.

Does it enhance these poems to read one against the other? Next to "Burning the Leaves", "The Bonfire" seems both more suggestive, the more restrained, the later poem coming across all the more strongly as a piece of commentary, an interpretation. Huws uses enjambement more adventurously than Nemerov. Nemerov seems to belong to the crowd ("We thought of all the generations gone"), Huws to be the more widely watchful, detailing the effects of the bonfire's collapse from the immediate human reaction to the owl's bafflement to the lingering aftermath.

The Bonfire

Through the mist and in the entrancing dank
Fullness of the November night a crowd
Stumbled with torch-flash and laugh towards the bank
Where the fire was laid
Above the inscrutable river. Neighbours to to
And fro children calling, stick cracking and loud
Bark of a dog suddenly stopped as through
The straw a small flame played;

Licking about among the old copy books,
Shavings, broken records, gum boots and board,
Breeding with wonderful vigour, shooting out forks,
Shock troops to tackle the hard
Soaked logs which held their line like sweating police
Making a cordon. And all the people stare,
Feasting on destruction, glad that the lease
Of twelve months fret and care

Has fallen in. By proxy purged their eye
Lights with absent innocence, their flesh
Is burnished and their form against the sky
Gilded and jewelled as
An Ikon; so a borrowed sanctity
Seems for a moment theirs until a crash
Flings showers of sparks among the company
Which breaks up where it has

Space to, stepping sideways from the whorls
Of smoke and skirting the bank to miss
The drop into the river. A brand that falls
Is snatched up by a boy
And hurled out over the water, there to meet
Its own reflection with a strangled hiss.
While the roaring logs throw out their heat
A troubled owl gives cry

Hooting among the trees on the other side
Of the river, blinded in his own
Territory, forced in his own hour to make a wide
Detour round the keen
Burning smell that hangs in the damp air
All night and far across the fields is blown.
Even at noon next day ash smoulders where
The bonfire has been.

EDRICA HUWS (1950)

Burning the Leaves

This was the first day that the leaves
Came down in hordes, in hosts, a great wealth
Gambled away over the green lawn
Belonging to the house old fry and spawn
Of the rich year converted into filth
In the beds by the wall the gutters under the eaves.
We thought of all the generations gone
Like that flyers migrants fugitives.

We come like croupiers with rakes,
To a bamboo clatter drag these winnings in,
Our windfall, firstfruits, tithes, and early dead
Fallen on our holdings from overhead
And taxable to trees against our sin.
Money to burn! We play for higher stakes
Than the mere leaves, and, burdened with treasure, tread
The orbit of the tree that heaven shakes.

The wrath of God we gather up to-day,
But not for long. In the beginning night
We light our hoarded leaves the flames arise,
The smell of smoke takes memory by surprise,
And we become as children in our sight.
That is I think the object of this play,
Though the children dance about our sacrifice
Unthinking, their shadows lengthened and cast away.

HOWARD NEMEROV (1959)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "A Righteous Man" by Edwin Muir, click here.

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