The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The opening lines of “Autumn” immediately focus on the details of the late summer landscape. Clare describes the thistledown, or fuzzy thistle seeds a bit like dandelion seeds, flying through the air despite the absence of wind. In the English countryside, the sight is a well-known marker of the end of summer, much like the leaves turning color or the days getter shorter. For his audience, then, the image would have immediately announced the poem’s time of year. However, Clare refrains from romanticizing the flight of the thistledown, even though it is beautiful. Instead, he describes it in a matter-of-fact way, focusing more on the particulars of their movement in relation to the landscape than the way they look to the speaker as they fill the air. That careful attention towards the material world is a hallmark of Clare’s writing, which is characterized by deep knowledge of the countryside and a patient capacity to observe it as it really is.
The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.
The final two lines of the second stanza make an interesting contrast to the beginning of the poem. There, Clare described the landscape from an objective distance, neither romanticizing the autumnal landscape nor mourning the end of summer, but rather merely stating what he saw. Yet here, although he has just written that the end of summer has left the land completely dry, he also states that the hard ground appears to glitter like water in the sun. The material reality isn’t the whole truth, because the human observer also encounters beauty and illusion. Similarly, the line about the gossamers, or cobwebs, floating in the air contrasts with the opening line about the thistledown. The two images are similar: both describe a fluffy substance whose flight is closely associated with fall in the English countryside. However, Clare describes the cobwebs far more vividly and idiosyncratically. He uses the verb “twitter,” which really refers to sound, to instead describe the appearance of their bright and unexpected movements. The verb “flung” affords additional energy to the movement of the cobwebs through space, emphasizing the excitement of watching them float.
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
In this line, Clare uses parallel sentence structure to move towards the abstraction of the final lines of the poem. “Autumn” has, until now been a poem carefully grounded in the material reality of the countryside. When the poet employed figurative language, it was always simile, which draws a comparison without suggesting that the two things could be mistaken for one another. Here, Clare cleverly juxtaposes one straightforward description with one metaphor. The hard, dry ground is “burning hot” in the sunlight, and, in the same breath, the air is liquid gold. To voice these descriptions of a landscape suffused with light, Clare reverses the conventional order of a sentence, writing “burning hot is the ground” rather than “the ground is burning hot.” The reversal blurs the lines between the real thing and what it is being compared to: the burning heat and the liquid gold come first, and hence feel almost more real than the ground and the air. That shift away from material reality enables the encounter with the sublime in the final line of the poem.
