Autumn Song (Chanson d’automne)
When a sighing begins
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,
My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and long
Pale as with pain,
Breath fails me when
The hours toll deep.
My thoughts recover
The days that are over,
And I weep.
And I go
Where the winds know,
Broken and brief,
To and fro,
As the winds blow
A dead leaf.
Notes
Where William Shakespeare tallied the mechanical chime of the clock striking down the harvest, Paul Verlaine surrenders to the languid, weeping violins of autumn, allowing their prolonged sobs to wound the heart with an inescapable, monotonous grief. The speaking subject strips the ego of its heroic agency, demonstrating how solitary consciousness is suffocated by involuntary memory when the hour tolls, reduced to a passive, breathless passenger adrift upon the indifferent currents of the wind like a dead leaf. It anchors September’s theme of Echo in the somber acoustic of mortal surrender, reminding us that repetition is also the quiet terror of seasonal decline—a sorrowful melody that carries the solitary self across barren thresholds where yesterday can neither be retained nor reclaimed. #September #PaulVerlaine #Echo #Time #Poetry