Poems About September: The First Breeze of Autumn Is Here
The first breeze of Autumn…it’s here now. The leaves turning orange as summer waves goodbye to us. Many writers, poets, artists have tried to re-create the September they saw onto the paper or canvas in front of them.
I’m just trying to re-create it too. On your phone screen.
Let’s dive deep into these beautiful poems about September.
Let’s begin by looking at a snippet by one of my favorite novelists.
In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn’t tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.
-Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Have you too ever had that out-of-the-body experience on a September afternoon? The world around you is going on and you’re sitting on your bed, your feet dangling over the edge, not touching the cold floor by just a breath away. The windows are pulled wide open as the sun shines all its glory on you. You realize this particular moment, this very day, won’t ever show its face to you again. You’re determined to live it to the very best.
Let’s celebrate this month together.
Today as I wake up there’s a coldness in the air. 5:36 and the fan whirs overhead as I try to find a good enough position to sleep in but there’s a kind of restlessness in my body. I decide to just get up after having turned my alarm off twice. Some time later I realize 2025 is almost at a close. Already? I sit on a chair, shivering a little, and think about September.
Poems about September
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.–September 1, 1939, W.H. Auden
September has come and I wake
And I think with joy how whatever, now or in future,
the system
Nothing whatever can take
The people away, there will always be people
For friends or for lovers though perhaps
The conditions of love will be changed and its vices
diminished
And affection not lapse
To narrow possessiveness, jealousy founded on vanity.
September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place;
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has
rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy;
Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow,
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.–Autumn Journal, by Louis MacNeice
This poem speaks of September as not just a month or a time of the year, but all the memories and moments and kisses that it brings. Remembrance. Nostalgia. Naked trees and old love. Waking up and finding yourself in a new world.
Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly; they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four.
-Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories
It’s all very short. It all passes very quickly. Just imagine, only four Sundays! So less time to do all that you wanted to do on a September Sunday! What would you even be waiting for? While we’re at it, I wanted to ask, why are you waiting for Sunday exactly? For weekends, really? You’re waiting for weekends as if any one day of September could be any less beautiful than another! It’s all magic! Seriously, don’t wait. Go make memories now.
Emily Brontë speaks of fall and the days of this season in her poem Fall, leaves, fall.
…
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.–Fall, leaves, fall, by Emily Brontë
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
–To Autumn, by John Keats
Not everyone welcomes September, though, some of us are busy mourning the end of blissful summer, the changing season, as if so beautiful painted a picture of in this piece.
“But what about summer? I’m not ready to let go of summer!” Someone says, and someone replies, “Just one more year! Hold on for one more year!”
The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grownups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall – they fell unnoticed – seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.
-James Baldwin, Just Above My Head
This beautiful poem about Wendell Berry paints the picture of just one single moment on a September evening. The poet gazes at the sky, the valley, the fields. And then his own mind.
And in my mind, where had stood a garden
straining to the light, there grew
an acceptance of decline. Having worked,
I would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight.–September 2, by Wendell Berry
There comes a day each September when you wake up and know the summer is over and fall has arrived. The slant of the sun looks different and something is in the air—a coolness, a hint of frosty mornings to follow. I woke early on the morning of September 24 and reached for a warmer petticoat.
-Ann Rinaldi, Time Enough for Drums
Lo! a ripe sheaf of many golden days
Gleaned by the year in autumn’s harvest ways,
With here and there, blood-tinted as an ember,
Some crimson poppy of a late delight
Atoning in its splendor for the flight
Of summer blooms and joys
This is September.–September, Lucy Maud Montgomery
Autumn is a poem – while you fall for everything, you remember that there is something worth dying for.
-Laura Chouette
And finally, this beautiful, melancholic poem. Receding summer. A reluctance in letting it go. A desperate attempt to hold on for a bit longer.
It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.
–September Tomatoes, by Karina Borowicz
Find the complete poem here.
All these varying pieces of writing in succession shows the changing moods of September. I’m happy one day and sorrowful the other. On some days I believe I’ll conquer the world, one others I chant show me the way. It’s a forever oscillating pendulum. I return to feelings I had felt ages ago but hadn’t remembered. I return to long days and shorter ones, I return to the same room, the same slanting ray of sunshine, the same bare feet dangling over the edge, the same cold floor, the same Japanese dramas. It’s an oscillation and whenever I return to September, I remember the one that passed last year, the year before than, and before that, and before that. All these Septembers! What beautiful memories!
Now this is my question to you: what does September mean for you? What does it bring? What memories? What nostalgia? What reawakening of some old fire? Passion? What is it?
Out of all these quotes and poems about September, which one would you call your most loved? Or maybe your favorite poem about September isn’t featured here?
The comment section is open.
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