BRILLIANT HUES OF STRANGLED LIFE

TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF AUTUMN ...

On this day in 1819, twenty-five-year-old John Keats wrote to his friend, Charles Brown, to say that he was giving up poetry for journalism. 

This is also the first day of autumn.

 Four days earlier in 1819 Keats had written "To Autumn," now one of his most popular poems, and one which many critics regard as "flawless in structure, texture, tone, and rhythm":

 "Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too --"

It is a stanza quoted by Wolf Howl in THE LAST SHAMAN

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Keats had quit the study of medicine for poetry in 1816. 

In three years he had published some, earned little, and been much-attacked by the critics. 

 This new decision was a response to the harvest that never was, and a resolve to fill his cupboard himself:

 "It is quite time I should set myself doing something, and live no longer upon hopes."

Are you feeling like that about your own writing? 

 It is only human to feel such when long efforts seem to reap hardly any harvest. 

The bright leaves of autumn, though beautiful, are merely the result of the sap being withheld from them:

Brilliant hues of strangled life.

Perhaps you should learn from John Keats who left his dream, thinking his whole life lay before him.

And it did ... just not in the way he thought.

 Four months later Keats experienced his first lung hemorrhage.

"That drop of blood is my death warrant," he now wrote to Charles Brown.

 And a year after that he was dead from tuberculosis. 

Hold onto your dream.  Live it.  Cling to the song of creation in your heart.

A modern poet, Fernando Ortega, has written:

But lately I have seen you fading
As the world is changing,
As the seasons fly.
Still my heart in secret
Holds on to the deepest colors
Of the earth and sky.