Autumn Music: Poetry in the Minor Key

By Stephen H. Smith

Autumn Music is a selection of Stephen Smith’s verse written during the past twenty years. The author has, on the whole, kept the rhyme and meter simple, but has also tried to add just enough variety to avoid any monotony. Whether or not he has succeeded is for the reader to decide.

The titles of the eight sections into which this collection is divided are intended simply as rough guides to content and mood and are not intended to indicate any disparity of subject matter.

The content and themes of the poems are the traditional ones – love, life, landscape, and the brevity of existence.

The poetry is always best read with music in mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805146636

Stephen H. Smith

Stephen H. Smith is a retired secondary school teacher who began writing verse over thirty years ago. He has been placed in the Top Hundred of the Poetry Now (Peterborough) competition on several occasions, and once in the top twenty out of 50,000 entries. He also came first in the rhyming category of the 2006 Coast to Coast competition.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

I  GHOSTS

Ghosts

Obsession

Parlour Talk

In Love

Years Ago

The Old Obsession

Delusion

Phantasy

The Well of Wonder

The Tassel

Brief Proximity

The Agnostic

In the Vale of Pickering

Three Ditties

Night on the Downs

Castle Bluff

The Chapel Nigh the Field

Showery Daze

II  REMEMBERED RAPTURES

Remembered Gardens

Timeless Rapture

The Gloucester Service

At the Still Centre

Cambridge Dusk

On Crickley Hill

The Gannet

Derelict

On Pulpit Rock

The Deathless Ones

After Horace

Hunstone Avenue

Inception

Beneath the Boughs

The Dawning of the World

October Anniversary

III  DECLINE & FALL

The Consolation of Sadness

Death on the Underground

Darby and Joan

Singing after the Dead

The Ebbing Tide

The Coming of Age

Tombstone, 1881-1981

An Old Man’s Meditation

Cortège

Prayer Request

Sad Light

Votive Candle

The Last Farewell

True Destiny

The Garden Supper

The Song of the Rose

Mother

Recession

Young Love Viewed from Fifty

Remembered Gardens

Forgotten Epitaph

Mid-Life Crisis

Old Ted

Flight 103

The Helmet

IV  WAR’S EMBERS

The Last Tommy

Forgotten Voices

The Last Postcard

Before Battle

Elegy

The Banks of Green Willow

The New Lover

V  SALAD DAYS

Three Guest House Settings

Fantasia

The Stars among the Pines

The Grand Hotel, New Brighton

Family Album

River Idyll

Severn Meadows

Bredon Hill

Night at the Old Guest House

Cambridge Memories

Richmond Hill

Autumn in Sussex

The Cross on Yew Down

Bluebells in High Wood

Mullion Cove

Off Shed

Snowbound

The Old School

The Hotel Belvedere

Drinking Song

Glip

VI  PEOPLE & PLACES

A Chamber Rhapsody

Stellar Secrets

Hesperus

Summer Breeze

Towards Silence

Blackcap

North Landing

Hobson’s Choice

VII  VISTAS & VIGILS

The Darkened Valley

Points of Departure

The High Place

A Place and a Name

At the End of the Day

The Nearly Man

Fresh Start

Margaret

Loneliness in Autumn

Imagined Love

Autumn Reverie

October Morning

The Street Lamp

Prelude to an Act of Worship

VIII  BLOWN PETALS

Medusa

Stillness

Painting the Sky

Remembered Light

Love in the Landscape

Seasons

To a Young Girl Dancing in the Breeze

Three Whimsies

Wordless Wonder

Five Tankas

Runes of Regret

November Woods

Déjà Vu

EPITAPH

Preface

Poetry incorporates, but is not identical to verse. The latter is traditionally associated with strict rhyme and metre (or meter). Of course, there is still plenty that can be done within the constraints of the ‘rules’, and the rules might be broken in a judicious sort of way, but in the final analysis there are limits. Poetry’s chief concern is the sense and feel of language, however expressed. D.H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers, for example, is a work that is chock-full of poetry, perhaps more so than any book of verse we may encounter: we must not be fooled by the fact that it is a work of prose.

Having said all that, I must come clean by stating that the present volume is decidedly a book of verse – so much so that I would hesitate to call it poetry at all in the broader sense (despite the sub-title). If there is poetry in it, so much the better, but verse it is, and so it will remain. It is still today the most popular form of literary expression. Witness, for example, the public reaction to the publication of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad which, although a slow starter in the literary markets, was the next most likely possession, after the Bible, to be found in a Tommy’s kitbag in the trenches.

This present offering is a selection of my verse written during the past twenty years. I have kept the rhyme and metre simple, on the whole, but have tried to add just enough variety to avoid monotony. Whether or not I have succeeded is for the reader to decide.

The titles of the eight sections into which this collection is divided are intended simply as rough guides to content and mood and are not intended to indicate any disparity of subject matter.

Finally, a word of explanation regarding the rather frequent use of the first-person singular in my work: the ‘I’ verses are not meant to describe or comment on my personal experience, for in many cases it does not apply personally, despite my use of that pronoun. Generally-speaking, it is used of the commonality of experience, and in particular of those situations that are likely to attract a common empathy.

I

GHOSTS

Ghosts

I: Almost Eden

The first shy glance from her blue-visioned eyes

Was Eden – almost – to my sighing heart;

Her first soft words were not quite paradise,

Although they set my furtive soul apart.

Then came her first inebriating touch,

And my resistance melted with the sun;

And since the world no longer mattered much,

I knew my Eden had at last begun.

II: In Perpetuum

Plagued like a muse from which I cannot flee,

I am constrained to scribe her name upon

The hearts of all who empathise with me,

Luckless in love, as if our fates were one.

Perhaps my desert wanderings are the fate

Of all the heart of beauty could not move –

Who realised their lethargy too late

To rectify their diffidence in love.

III: Violet

Frail violet, blossom for an hour,

Set your sweet lips to lips of mine,

And let the fragrance of the flower

Infuse my veins with lovers’ wine.

Too fleeting is the heart’s first chance

Whose moment may not come again,