From Knock to Knell: An Autumnal Double Act

Today I was struck by three acorns! Nature has a peculiar way of tapping us on the head when she wants to remind us of something. If it were a meteor, we’d call it apocalyptic. If it were a coin, we’d call it providence. But an acorn – that comic nut of destiny – is Nature’s way of declaring, ‘Autumn has arrived, dear fellow, and you’d best get your boots on.’ It’s the most whimsical of heralds, the oak’s polite cough before it strips itself naked for winter.

Autumn’s always been the philosopher’s season, the great leveller of moods, the sly whisper in the ear that time, like the sap, is slipping downwards. If spring’s an ingénue, prancing in green, and summer the golden drunkard shouting with his shirt off, autumn’s the reflective uncle at the fireside, glass of port in hand, telling you about the futility of empire while the curtains twitch against the wind. The Greeks had Persephone, who, much to her irritation, was yanked underground for a third of the year to keep Hades company – autumn being the opening act to her subterranean sojourn. In the Norse sagas, Yggdrasil itself, that cosmic ash-tree, was watched by creatures awaiting Ragnarok – and though not strictly an oak, I can’t help but sense in the shedding of leaves a rehearsal for apocalypse, the tree rehearsing its role as martyr.

The oak itself, of course, is no minor player in mythology. The Druids revered it as the king of trees – strong, enduring, with roots that grip the underworld and branches that petition heaven. To carry an acorn was to carry a pocket-sized talisman of fertility, fortune, and longevity, as though one could smuggle immortality in one’s coat. The Romans swore their emperors in beneath oaken boughs, crowning them with its leaves to show they were in communion with Jupiter. Yet the acorn, for all its gravitas, is comical in shape – a tiny nut wearing a ridiculous hat, the gnome of the forest. It’s Hamlet’s Yorick in miniature: a reminder that great oaks (and greater empires) are born and undone in the same absurd shell.

There is, too, something deeply psychological about the way autumn presses itself upon us. The shortening of days, the dimming of light, the first mist on the breath – all these things force upon us an awareness of change. I can’t wander through autumn unreflective. The acorn clatters down like a memento mori, the leaves drop like pages torn from an old diary, and we, suddenly aware of our own mortality, brew endless pots of tea to keep the encroaching shadows at bay. The body feels it too: the sluggishness, the need for warm socks, the odd craving for root vegetables as if one were secretly part badger. It’s the season in which we discover ourselves turning inward, growing nostalgic, rearranging shelves, as if preparing the soul for some winter hibernation.

Shakespeare, naturally, saw it coming. In Sonnet 73 he writes:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold…

That, in essence, is the autumnal condition: to be reminded, with every gust and every acorn ricochet, that we’re not eternal summers but fleeting seasons. Even Keats, in his Ode to Autumn, felt the paradox – the ripeness, the fullness, the abundance on the one hand, and on the other, the heavy awareness that death’s already gathering in the fields. It’s comedy and tragedy at once – a farce of falling nuts, a requiem of falling leaves.

And yet, I’d argue autumn’s the most honest of seasons. Summer lies to us with promises of endless joy, spring seduces us with blossom, and winter exaggerates its cruelty – but autumn tells us the truth. It whispers: you’re fading, but you’re beautiful in your fading. The acorn that strikes you isn’t an insult but a benediction – proof that the tree’s still fertile, that new life’s possible, even as the year decays. Autumn’s the season of paradox: the most melancholic, yet the most abundant; the most solemn, yet the most comic.

So let’s not complain about the bruise left by a falling acorn. It’s better than a bill, a bullet, or a banker’s demand. It’s Nature herself sending a playful reminder that the world turns, that empires crumble, that leaves fall – and that from a silly little nut wearing a cap, whole forests may yet rise again.

But if the acorn provides autumn’s knock, Thomas Gray supplies its knell. Where I have bruises, he has bells. My comedy becomes his solemnity. So let’s turn from the oak’s slapstick to the churchyard’s gravitas.

Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is itself an autumnal sermon, a tolling bell across centuries. It’s the great poem of death’s democracy, of the levelling power that drops kings and peasants into the same soil.

Gray strolls through the village graveyard at dusk, the cattle wandering home, the curfew bell tolling, the day’s work ending. There he pauses to honour the ‘rude forefathers of the hamlet’ – the forgotten poor, their talents buried with them, their glories never known. Poverty, obscurity, lack of opportunity – these robbed the world of possible Miltons, Cromwells, and Hampdens. ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’ The lines fall on us like leaves: beautiful, inevitable, tinged with melancholy.

Here, too, the oak presides. Beneath its branches, Gray muses that ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’ How neatly this dovetails with the comedy of acorns! The same tree that strikes us with slapstick also shelters us with solemnity. The same season that gives us roasted chestnuts reminds us of our mortality. The knock and the knell, the bruise and the elegy, belong to one performance.

And therein lies the paradox of autumn. It’s both joke and requiem, both pratfall and prayer. To be struck by an acorn is to be reminded that Nature is comic; to read Gray is to be reminded she’s tragic. The one makes you laugh at the indignity of bruises, the other makes you weep at the dignity of the forgotten. Together they remind us that life, like the year, falls from fullness into silence – with a smile, with a sigh.

And yet, Gray’s knell’s too rich not to hear in full. To leave it in summary would be like quoting only the punchline of a joke, or gathering only the husk of the acorn without planting it. Let’s walk with him, stanza by stanza, through the country churchyard.

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I wrote the following some years ago in an attempt to give a commentary on Gray’s piece.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard – Thomas Gray (1751)

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

The cow and the ploughman know when to go home; only poets linger in graveyards. It’s the hour of acorns, dusk’s practical joke.

Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

That stillness of autumn evenings! We call it tranquillity, but it’s really the world drawing its shawl about its shoulders.

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

The owl: eternal churchwarden of the dusk, lodging complaints at the moon.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Gray’s democratic genius: ploughmen, milkmaids, forgotten – all levelling the ground by lying beneath it. Autumn rehearses the same: leaves, oaks, and we ourselves stripped.

The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,
The swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed,
The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

Morning will come, but they’ll not rise. One day we too will oversleep eternity.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Death robs us of domestic rituals – hearth, kiss, tea. Autumn lets us feel their value by threatening loss.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

The honest toil of the rustic. Autumn was their triumph, and their yoke.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The short and simple annals – what a phrase! Autumn’s exactly this: short, simple, but profound.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Here’s Gray’s epitaph for kings and acorn-struck philosophers alike.

Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault,
If Mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where thro’ the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

The poor may lack choirs, but autumn crowns them in gold leaves.

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Statues crumble, acorns sprout. The comic nut has more life than marble.

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,
Or wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre.

The tragedy of wasted greatness – potential unfulfilled. How many Miltons knocked senseless before they wrote?

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Poverty chills, as autumn chills. Yet from frost, strange flowers sometimes grow.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

The line everyone knows. Lost potential. An acorn that never grows.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.

Village heroes, forgotten. Autumn’s full of such almosts.

Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,
And read their hist’ry in a nation’s eyes,

The great deeds denied them – yet perhaps mercifully. Ambition’s rarely kind.

Their lot forbad: nor circumscrib’d alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin’d;
Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

Better obscurity than cruelty. An acorn spared the axe.

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.

They were spared corruption, spared court flattery. Autumn pares away such lies.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Perhaps the most enduring line. Autumn itself is ‘far from the madding crowd.’ Except when nuts fall.

Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

A sigh’s enough. Autumn’s a season of sighs.

Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.

Headstones are their poetry. Autumn’s leaves are our texts.

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind?

Even leaves cling. Even acorns hesitate. None depart willingly.

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.

Ashes glow. So too do autumn embers.

For thee, who mindful of th’ unhonour’d Dead
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely Contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall enquire thy fate,

Gray imagines himself remembered by one stray reader – just as we stumble over acorns and take them for messages.

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
“Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.

The poet remembered not as hero but as eccentric. A man of dews and dawns.

There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
His listless length at noontide wou’d he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

The poet’s habit: lying about in fields. Autumn indulges him.

Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Mutt’ring his wayward fancies he wou’d rove,
Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
Or craz’d with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.

The usual poetic ailments. Autumn is their nurse.

One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill,
Along the heath and near his fav’rite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

The inevitable absence. The leaf fallen, the poet gone.

The next with dirges due in sad array
Slow thro’ the church-way path we saw him borne—
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,
Grav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.”

And so the poet is equal with the villagers. His epitaph is his elegy.

The Epitaph

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown;
Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.

Autumn marks us too. Melancholy’s her inheritance.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav’n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,
He gain’d from Heav’n (‘twas all he wish’d) a friend.

Better than crowns or trophies: a tear for misery, a friend for comfort.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.

The curtain falls. The play ends. Autumn closes the year.

Thus ends Gray’s Elegy, and our autumnal double act: the knock of the acorn, the knell of the church bell. Comedy and tragedy bound together like twigs in a faggot. Autumn, in her wisdom, offers both bruise and blessing.

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