The 2024 harvest moon is September 17th.
First a poem courtesy of the Daily Poem at The Paris Review – from August 28.
Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes
I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down.
And ticking with unpaused breath.
Sweet night, sweet, steady, reliable, uncomplicated night.
September moon, two days from full,
There is no sound as the moon slots up, no thorns in its body.
Invisible, the black gondola floats
Charles Wright (1935 – )
The Harvest Moon
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks upward
To lie on the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.
The harvest moon has come,
Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.
And the earth replies all night, like a deep drum.So people can’t sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.
The harvest moon has come!And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep
Stare up at her petrified, while she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry `We are ripe, reap us!’ and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.
It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
Of Nature have their image in the mind,
As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer’s close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)
Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
Carl Sandburg (1878 –1967)
All is safely gathered In
At harvest time in school we sang the harvest hymn:
“All is safely gathered in
Ere the winter storms begin”
– although we could all see the wheat and barley fields still uncut. Ritual, not reality. No matter.
John Clare
And finally to John Clare whose Shepherd’s Calendar for September reminds us of a time when gathering the harvest involved everyone. The village empties out and all hands to the fields. It’s a communal effort followed by communal celebration. The success of the harvest made the difference between survival and starvation in the coming winter.
September
Harvest awakes the morning still
And toils rude groups the valleys fill
Deserted is each cottage hearth
To all life save the crickets mirth
Each burring wheel their sabbath meets
Nor walks a gossip in the streets
The bench beneath its eldern bough
Lined oer with grass is empty now
Where blackbirds caged from out the sun
Could whistle while their mistress spun.
All haunt the thronged fields still to share
The harvests lingering bounty there
As yet no meddling boys resort
About the streets in idle sport
The butterflye enjoys his hour
And flirts unchaced from flower to flower
And humming bees that morning calls
From out the low huts mortar walls
Which passing boy no more controuls
Flye undisturbed about their holes
And sparrows in glad chirpings meet
Unpelted in the quiet street
extract from The Shepherd’s Calendar by John Clare (1793-1864)
Wonderful paintings and poems. It’s a great time of year. How good it must have been when it was all a community event.
We are so lucky to have the poetry of John Clare as he chronicled the life of the village. It is easy to see his poetry as a record of what happens to “indigenous people” when they are “colonised” by “capitalism” (excuse the cliched language.) In this situation it was the inhabitants of Clare’s home village of Helpston in Northamptonshire.
But to your point – the harvest was a communal effort. And so was the celebration. Everyone took part. Different times.