AUTUMN POEMS

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness (John Keats)
Autumn was described by the famous poet John Keats (1795-1821) as the season of mists, when the plants are completing their year's life cycle. The trees are full of nuts which squirrels bury for the hungry winer months (but in fact, they actually bury them and then forget where they put them!) and the leaves on the trees are turning to lovely shades of red and gold.
Write either a poem or a description of what autumn is like wher eyou live. Write a draft to start with and then write out the neat version. Illustrate your work if you like drawing.(1)



(2)
A Child’s Calendar
November by John Updike
The stripped and shapely
Maple grieves
The ghosts of her
Departed leaves.
The ground is hard,
As hard as stone.
The year is old,
The birds are flown.
And yet the world,
In its distress,
Displays a certain
Loveliness.

Nature XXVII, Autumn by Emily Dickinson
The morns are meeker than they were.
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry’s cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town. The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I’ll put a trinket on.

Nothing Gold Can Stay, by Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold,
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Pumpkin poem, Anonymous
When all the cows were sleeping
And the sun had gone to bed,
Up jumped the pumpkin,
And this is what he said:
I’m a dingle dangle pumpkin
With a flippy floppy hat.
I can shake my stem like this,
And shake my vine like that.

(1) From Writing Worksheet U 2, New Citizens 1, Longman,
by Jim Lawley and Rodrigo Fernández Carmona
(2) Picture from BBC October, 2008 Autumn Watching