Autumn: The Season of Harvest, Reflection, and Thanksgiving
This descriptive essay explores what makes autumn a uniquely resonant season. Drawing on poetry by Keats and Hopkins, Shakespeare's sonnets, and Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation, the essay argues that autumn occupies a singular place in human experience—simultaneously evoking mortality and mirth, harvest and hope, reflection and festivity. The essay examines autumn's ties to All Hallows' Eve, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day, then turns to the history and spirit of Thanksgiving as the holiday that best captures the season's dual nature. Ultimately, autumn is presented not as an ending but as a profound and passing moment within the larger cycle of life.
- Introduction: Autumn as the Season of Poets and Spirits: Poetry, spirits, and autumn's haunting dual nature
- What Autumn Does to the Mind and Mood: Autumn's unique effect on reflection and wistfulness
- The Harvest and the Meditation on Mortality: Harvest imagery and Shakespeare on impermanence
- Mirth, Merriment, and the Lighter Side of Fall: Hay rides, football, and autumn's joyful moments
- Thanksgiving: The Holiday That Illuminates the Season: Lincoln's proclamation and family Thanksgiving traditions
- Autumn Giving Way to Winter: Season's close, leftovers, and transition to winter
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay weaves literary allusions (Keats, Hopkins, Shakespeare) naturally into descriptive passages, giving the writing intellectual depth without feeling pedantic.
- It balances the solemn and the celebratory throughout, mirroring autumn's own dual character—this tonal duality is the essay's central rhetorical achievement.
- Concrete sensory details (hot cocoa, crunching leaves, one's breath visible in cold night air) ground abstract meditations on mortality and harvest in everyday experience.
- Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation is used as a historical anchor that reinforces the essay's thematic argument rather than merely providing background information.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates thematic coherence through extended analogy: autumn's natural cycle (ripening, harvest, decline) is consistently mapped onto human emotional and spiritual experience. Every piece of evidence—whether a poem, a historical proclamation, or a family Thanksgiving scene—is selected because it illustrates the same central tension between endings and continuity. This technique shows how a descriptive essay can carry an analytical argument without ever stating it as a formal thesis.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with poetic epigraphs and seasonal imagery to establish mood, then moves outward from the personal and literary to the historical (Lincoln, the Pilgrims) and finally back inward to the family and the communal. The conclusion mirrors the introduction by returning to sensory imagery, creating a circular structure that enacts the cyclical nature of the seasons it describes.
Introduction: Autumn as the Season of Poets and Spirits
What is it that makes autumn so special? Perhaps it is that autumn is the season of poets. Keats wrote his ode "To Autumn," describing it as the "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." Hopkins penned "Spring and Fall," with all the emphasis on the latter as he addressed the young girl to whom the poem was dedicated:
"Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?"
Hopkins gently chided Margaret, convinced that she was not so much mourning the falling of the leaves as she was mourning her own fallen nature and the debt that she—like all—must inevitably pay. Though, of course, what could she know of this, being only a child? Hopkins, like a cold autumnal cloud, poured cold water over the girl's feelings while not refraining from a certain sneer. To prove what? That man is meant to grieve? And what better time to grieve than when nature itself seems in the very throes of its final hours, offering a flash of terminal lucidity?
But then again, that is autumn. Autumn is like a ghost calling an end to summer's swells, to paraphrase Keats. It is the end of the dance—yet not the end of the dance. There is still light left, but the sun is in its descent. The sky is orange and purpling. The warmth of the day is giving place to a slight nipping breeze. And what awaits? Something on the other side? Autumn is the season of spirits. All Hallows' Eve, followed by the Feast of All Saints, followed by the Feast of All Souls (Newland, 1999): prayers for the dead, prayers for the poor souls in purgatory, feasting and praying, fasting and mourning.
Autumn is the season of cemeteries. Yet it does not leave one there. It is also a season of hunkering down, of gathering and storing and getting ready for the long winter months ahead. Autumn is a season for thinking on the end of things—but it is not the end of things itself.
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