The emotional suffering of wintertime is well known, so strong that it often endures into springtime. An autumnal mood, however, is more complex.
We feel hints of lingering warmth in the Fall, along with the opportunity to embrace cozy comforts such as warm drinks and soft blankets that would have been painful in the heat of summer.
Nonetheless, autumn brings an undeniable darkening of the world. An autumnal feeling is thus an emotion of loss that has just begun, a loss which will certainly grow worse.
The plausibility of late summer gardens is gone, the leaves browning in the lowering light. Yet, we hang on, like the leaves on the trees, even as the world around us displays the colors of death
So it is that the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow observed,
The lyre of Autumn hangs unstrung
And o’er its tremulous chords are flung
The fringes of decay.
An autumnal mood is not restricted to the last months of the calendar, of course. It can come at any time we feel ourselves to be on the fringes of decay.
