Today’s Poem: Autumn

Everyone you know is dying

Graduation procession, University of Toronto, 1920 (Wikimedia Commons)

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We enter now on the season of graduations: colleges in May, high schools in June. Graduation exercises are called Commencement for a reason, emphasizing the ceremony as a beginning, a great collective launch into some new unknown. As graduation speakers are wont to say, it’s the end of a journey, but also the beginning. Today’s college valedictorian in Phi Beta Kappa hood, hung about with honors: tomorrow’s graduate research assistant, first-year schoolteacher, or office dogsbody. Graduates weep on each other’s gowned shoulders, remembering how, four short years ago, they were nobodies together. But also, wherever they go next, they’ll be nobodies again for a while, and in their guts they know it. Plus ça change, and all that — up the ladder and down again, down and up, until the final plunge.

In 2022, Joseph Bottum (b. 1959), our Poems Ancient and Modern co-founder, was commissioned to write a poem for the Phi Beta Kappa graduates of Princeton University. The resulting sequence, Four Seasons, which also appears in his most recent book, Spending the Winter, imagines four different commencement addresses, each of which, in a different rhetorical register and poetic meter, looks simultaneously back and forward. Each moment of the year considers itself, but never in isolation. Summer knows that it belongs to winter. Spring with its liveliness conjures “God and sex,” but also death. The headiness of commencement becomes, at every turn, a memento mori. 

Mary Eberstadt introduces Joseph Bottum at an April 2024 poetry reading in Washington, D.C.

The cycle closes with Today’s Poem, “Autumn.” This final movement, dedicated to the year’s twilight, takes as its immediate subject the crepuscular stars, Phosphorus and Hesperus — which, as we learn in the first stanza, are really the same celestial body, the planet Venus. “In my beginning is my end,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “East Coker,” the second section of his own four-poem sequence, the Four Quartets. “In my end is my beginning.” In Bottum’s blank-verse poem, the morning and evening stars, which are really the same bright planet, become a figure for this unity of beginning and end, past and future, now and always.

But more than that, the true identity of this figure — Venus, the love goddess — gives the plus ça change changelessness of these cycles a particular character: that of humanizing love. If life is a wheel, it doesn’t have to grind you to powder. The inevitable knowledge that “you are mortal” doesn’t have to make your existence meaningless. Unlike the stars, people themselves have free will, which means change, and death, but also the capacity for kindness in the face of those realities. Indeed, the poem concludes, it’s the vocation of poets to say more than the Roman servants say, to say something more capacious, more hopeful, and more true: 

This is your Morning Star — that you must die.
This is your Evening Star — that you are free. 

And in the spacious place of that freedom, in which your feet are continually set, “Love, like Venus in her transit, marks / The way.” 

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Autumn

by Joseph Bottum

(in the blank verse of a philosophical pentameter)

Back in 1970, Saul Kripke,
Then Princeton’s great philosopher, observed
That Phosphorus, the dawning star of morning,
And Hesperus, the evening star at dusk,
Are both, in truth, the twilight planet Venus.
The sentence Phosphorus is Hesperus
Is thus a logical necessity,
Although that took millennia to learn. 

And what if many necessary truths
Are similar — both logical and waiting?
Think, for instance, of the proposition
That freedom of the will requires death.
The logic’s quick enough: Free will takes change,
And every change needs something’s dissolution. 

But other consequences may unfold
In time. The fact that all that lives must die
Unburdens us and eases small dismay.
Undoes ambition, greed, the rush of fame.
Unkindness, too: The price of living long
Is burying your parents, teachers, friends.
Be gentle. Everyone you know is dying. 
Be light of touch. Everyone’s an orphan,
Soon enough. 
                         And take what time provides
A chance to seek the beautiful and wise,
To look to God, to live with graceful rites.
These come with death, like crimson leaves, and some
Will catch your eye and strike you as they fall. 

In ancient Roman triumphs, servants murmured
To generals and emperors, Remember
You are mortal, lest the cheering crowd
Fan belief that they had turned to gods.
Now poets are those servants, come to say,

     This is your Morning Star — that you must die.
     This is your Evening Star — that you are free. 

And Love, like Venus in her transit, marks
The way. 

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