A Seasonal Acrostic
The Secret Garden adapted from the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Library Theatre Company, 1994
Seasons are defined by colour,
Each as high as birds in flight.
All are rich. While some seem duller,
Some again are clear and bright.
Oil-painted by the weather,
Nature glows for our delight.
Spring is green and, in the garden,
Plants all raise a vernal cheer.
Roses bud and soft shoots harden,
Insects, slugs and snails appear.
Next door neighbour’s growing heather:
“Got your fork? I need to clear.”
Summer’s red as flame. Each morning
Up betimes, we toast our tans.
May is hot beneath the awning;
Mid-July, we’re using fans.
Every year the ground’s like leather.
Reimpose the hosepipe bans!
Autumn’s like a fire dying.
Umber ashes, brown and fawn,
Through the air drift, dead, then lying,
Undead embers on the lawn.
Myriad the leaves together,
Numberless the lives we mourn.
White, though, is the hue of winter,
Icy slice both sleet and hail.
Napkin-like the snow steals into
Tree and fern and pond and pail.
Ermined earth, enclosed in feather,
Rests beneath its swansdown veil.
Seasons thus mutate like magic
Every land they light upon,
And their bonds with earth are tragic –
Surely these cannot move on?
Oh, but time undoes that tether;
Now they’re here – and now they’re gone.
PS
No need to point out everything that might be wrong with this as a piece of poetry – I’m pretty sure it barely aspires to be called verse – but judging by the date it must have been one of the first things I ever wrote for Proscenium so I probably worked hard on it.
It was only when I started thinking about how to approach the task I’d been given that I noticed the word ‘season’, no less than the names of all four seasons themselves, comprise six letters each. What a gift. So that immediately dictated the form – bunch of interlocked couplets with a random fifth line that needed to rhyme each stanza. (Yes, I think that’s how Coleridge might have put it.)
Once I found how to work the trick, I got quite into acrostics, and every panto season thereafter would find me writing out the plots for the shows (we didn’t use the word ‘spoiler’ in those days, and anyway the plots were as familiar to our audiences as Homer’s epics had been to his), with the first letter of each paragraph spelling out the title of the show. (I reduced Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Snow White. There wasn’t enough plot to go round.) And thinking on my feet, at a later interview to become a puzzles editor I was able to recall my acrostics as an example of how I particularly liked words “when they are dancing”. You may wince, but needs must and I got the job.
I’m rather proud of Autumn. I’d forgotten I’d made that link between the leaves falling off the trees looking like drifting ashes after having set up the idea of fire in the Summer section immediately above it. And I like the internal near-rhymes of umber and embers, and leaves and lives in the closing two lines, and also the way it ends with a final reference to death and funerals.
Having said that, it was only when I came to reread the piece before loading it to the website that I realised, in this very stanza, I had rhymed dying with dying. So I had to do a quick rewrite before finally publishing it. I wonder of Philip Larkin ever had this trouble? Nah, probably too busy stamping books…