Well, since we are fast approaching September, I thought a poem about Autumn would be appropriate. This poem comes in at 35 on the top 100 Irish poems list. Every week I share a new top Irish poem. You can subscribe to my weekly dose of Irish email newsletter, where I share a new Irish joke and more every week.
The poem by Thomas Kinsella is about spending time at his wife’s family home. You might remember him from another of his poems in the top 100 Mirror in February. I find that Thomas Kinsella reflects a lot in his life but then puts those reflections to paper in an ever so-dramatic way. Sadly I learned that he passed away in December 2021 at the age of 93.nbsp;
In the poem Another September the speaker is plunged into the isolated world of his wife’s past. You will find my notes on this beautiful poem below.nbsp;
Another September
Domestic Autumn, like an animal
Another September is set in a country bedroom before dawn, at the family home of Kinsella’s wife, Eleanor, near Enniscorthy in Co. Wexford. The poet lies awake while she sleeps, listening to an autumn garden heavy with fruit trees and ripe smells drifting in through the open window.
Autumn is pictured as a gentle, familiar animal that welcomes back the daughter of the house but only half accepts the poet, the outsider who brings words and restless thinking into its world. As he drifts, his mind turns to stern figures of justice and truth, set against the soft, trusting sleep beside him.
It is the title poem of Kinsella’s first major collection, Another September, published by the Dolmen Press in Dublin in 1958, which won the Guinness Poetry Prize.
You will find the full poem in Thomas Kinsella’s Collected Poems 1956-2001 (Carcanet Press).