Fall is a season beloved by many. It is often celebrated in our literature, notwithstanding Henry David Thoreau’s claims (in Autumnal Tints) that the season “has not made a deep impression on our own literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry.” He still thinks it’s made a deeper impression in America than in England, “because the trees acquire but few bright colors there.” Considering that the man’s wanderings abroad were limited to Québec what can one say except that, like in most things, the pond dweller of Concord was wrong.

 I recently ran across an autumn poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, one of America’s 19th-century “Fireside Poets.” He’s unfortunately neglected today, in part because literary critics have decided no American poetry worth reading was written before Walt Whitman, in part because ordinary 19th-century literary vocabulary largely challenges even today’s collegian. 

 In “Autumn Thoughts” Whittier conducts a dialogue with “Earth.” Comparing the changing of the seasons to his own life, he tells Earth “an emblem of myself thou art.” Earth dissents, for while the world’s time seems cyclical, man’s clearly is not.

But thou, from whom the Spring hath gone
For whom the flowers no longer blow,
Who standest blighted and forlorn,
Like Autumn waiting for the snow.

No hope is thine of sunnier hours,
Thy Winter shall no more depart;
No spring revive thy wasted flowers,
Nor Summer warm thy frozen heart.

Of course, even the Earth’s seasons only seem cyclical. Each is different, because each occurs in history: où sont les nieges d’antan? Still, their seeming recurrence reminds us that life and history are larger than any one of us, humbly readjusting our perspectives, particularly about our own relative importance. Each of us will have a final fall, even if “falling leaves [still] drift by the window.”

 But autumn may teach more than the world will go on without us. The glories of fall foliage conceal an inner death. The romantic who extols the “autumn leaves of red and gold” is confronted by the pure scientist, who tells us that the blaze of color is the result of a lack of chlorophyll, the substance that makes leaves green, underproduced because of shorter days and longer nights. Its loss and the built-up of sugars and other chemicals in the fluid systems of leaves leads to their version of arboreal arteriosclerosis, “clogging arteries” that — eventually — result in the leaves falling from their tree life source.

 Yes, we may be bound for death. But autumn is a beautiful time of the year, a time that, in the words of poet Paul Dunbar, the year expends its resources on the lavish colors of “gaudy dress//and decks herself in garments bold//Of scarlet, purple, red, and gold.”

 The year goes out in style, hopefully not as empty show but with display of the “wealth” and “tribute” it has collected all year. So, too, should be our lives: should not their end reflect the glorious treasure a man has stored up through a lifetime, already on display in that time of life that is so determinative of what his eternity will look like? Just as Dunbar speaks of autumn as “treasurer of the year” into whose coffers “all the months pay bounty,” so ought not the end of a human life reflect the treasures gathered for eternity, immune from loss to moth, vermin, or thief (Matthew 6:19-21)? 

 For, if we truly believe our eschatology, then “life is changed, not ended,” and the glories a man has accumulated at the end of his earthly sojourn are transformed — not replaced — to reflect the glorious destiny of the children of God (Romans 8:18-21).

 But just as one cannot reach Easter but through Good Friday, neither can one attain to “the glorious freedom of the children of God” (v. 21) but through the passage of death. Yes, the leaf is glorious, but in its earthly glory, it is also dying. The lambent light of October fades into the gathering darkness of November, whose winds howl, stripping the trees of their last leaves. 

And, as St. Josemaría Escrivá reminds us (The Way, 736): “Have you seen the dead leaves fall in the sad autumn twilight? Thus souls fall each day into eternity. One day, the falling leaf will be you.”

Consider the image. I recall doing it once, in the churchyard of St. Peter’s, one of the oldest graveyards in New Jersey, in the Episcopal parish in my hometown of Perth Amboy. It was a November Sunday. The oak tree, shaken by the breezes off Raritan Bay, shed its few remaining brown leaves. Even those last ones, those stubborn hangers-on, eventually fall. “One day, the falling leaf will be you.”

In its beauty, autumn reminds us of our limits and our mortality, of a world that will keep spinning without us. “What part of the world would collapse if I were missing, if I were to die?” asks Escrivá (740). But autumn should also remind us of the beauty we should bring in our lives that, under the nourishing power of God’s grace, should burst forth “in the glorious revelation of the children of God.”

Autumn is often a time when people travel for “fall foliage.” Seemingly transient, leaves can teach us a lot.