Today’s Poem: Song in the Key of Autumn

Scudder Middleton’s Jazz Age solo

John Atkinson Grimshaw, Under the Harvest Moon, 1872. (Wikimedia Commons)

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Song in the Key of Autumn 

by Scudder Middleton

We are walking with the month 
To a quiet place. 
See, only here and there the gentians stand! 
Tonight the homing loon 
Will fly across the moon, 
Over the tired land.  
We were the idlers and the sowers, 
The watchers in the sun, 
The harvesters who laid away the grain. 
Now there’s a sign in every vacant tree, 
Now there’s a hint in every stubble field, 
Something we must not forget 
When the blossoms fly again. 

Give me your hand! 
There were too many promises in June. 
Human-tinted buds of spring 
Told only half the truth. 
The withering leaf beneath our feet, 
That wrinkled apple overhead, 
Say more than vital boughs have said 
When we went walking 
In this growing place.  
There is something in this hour  
More honest than a flower  
Or laughter from a sunny face. 

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Scudder Middleton (1888–1959) is hardly a household name anymore. But then — although in the 1910s and 1920s he was a Greenwich Village poet of some acclaim, and although he continued to dine out with the likes of Witter Bynner and Burford Lorimer, editor of the Saturday Evening Post — he never really was, himself, a household name.

The cartoonist Michael Maslin has recounted his curiosity regarding this obscure person, mentions of whom he had encountered in reading old interoffice memos in the New Yorker archives at the New York Public Library. According to Maslin, in 1929, Middleton — then an assistant to New Yorker fiction editor Katharine White — had wound up more or less by accident in the role of the magazine’s art-department “hand-holder.” It was his job, as mediator between the art editor and everyone else, to relay rejections to unlucky cartoonists and propose revisions to luckier ones. In other words, he was the messenger people wanted to shoot. 

Fortunately, nobody did shoot him. Like so other many young men of the era, Middleton had taken a hiatus from the literary life to fight in World War I. His departure for Europe and the battlefield reputedly inspired a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, with whom, in 1918, he had had a brief romantic fling. Unlike so many other young poets, he returned in one piece. In his active career, he published three volumes of verse: Streets and Faces in 1917, followed by The New Day in 1919 and 1927’s Upper Night.

After that, apparently, nothing. At least, he was finished with literary writing. From the New Yorker, he moved on to a series of editorial positions, mostly to do with theater and film. A 1938 non-fiction book, Dining, Wining, and Dancing in New York, seems to be his only later publication.

Telegram from Scudder Middleton to the editor of the Saturday Evening Post (George Herbert Lorimer Family Papers)

Today’s Poem, “Song in the Key of Autumn,” published in the Century in 1920, exhibits the early twentieth century’s fluid relation with traditional rhyme and meter. As its title suggests, this poem has the improvisational feel of a jazz solo — a fitting analogy for a poem written in the brief flowering of the Jazz Age, to which Joseph Moncure March, with his 1926 “The Wild Party,” arrived late, after the real fun was over.

If March was left with the sour aftertaste of drugs and sex, Middleton’s poem captures the headiness of the period just after the war, with little of its underlying franticness or its bitter cynicism. Its mood is that of the music, the solo line that ventures out farther and farther from the composition’s theme, but never  quite loses the thread.

In this poem, the lines swell and shrink from tetrameter to trimeter to pentameter to trimeter again, each of the three stanzas resists the impulse to rhyme before falling into it, as a resolution for each movement of the poem.  The poem’s thematic ebb and flow moves the reader from an autumnal present to a recollected summer of impossible promises, then back again to the falling leaves, the sadder-but-wiser 20th-century epiphany, that promises don’t keep themselves.  

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