By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

This morning, I rose with the birds and took a long walk. The air was cold. Cold, finally. The leaves were loud. They shook themselves, then shook themselves loose, while the wind seemed to swirl more than blow. Hot days belong to blowing air; autumn feels more circular in its motion. The birds wheeled, the leaves turned, and I kept lifting my own head toward the trees as change gathered my attention.

Autumn has a freedom that loosens summer’s grip on the mind. Thought, like windows, opens with the weather. Hope does too. Even the impulse to retreat feels generous now, something close to what bears must feel when they burrow beneath the leaves, and the world gives them permission to disappear for a while. The air carried that peculiar autumn scent, part earth and part sweetness, almost like marshmallows.

I kept trying to have serious thoughts, but the morning wouldn’t cooperate. Lines of poetry kept giggling their way onto my lips. I told the leaves they reminded me of a stanza from Wisława Szymborska’s “Love at First Sight”:

“Not quite ready yet
to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifling a laugh…”

The leaves seemed to understand her better than I did. They rushed together, separated, crossed one another in the wind, then disappeared behind me as I walked. Szymborska caught something the morning was performing for me: change can be playful even as it carries us toward an ending. The leaves were beautiful because they moved, because the wind kept rearranging them, because every pattern lasted only long enough to be noticed.

Weather has always made poets restless for this reason. It alters the world without replacing it. A face at dusk differs from the same face at noon. Snow changes a field. Fog draws the far hill inward until distance itself seems altered. A storm darkens an ordinary street until the houses look newly strange. The objects remain where they were, but the conditions of seeing have changed.

We tend to speak of beauty as if it belongs entirely to the thing itself: the beautiful face, the beautiful landscape, the beautiful day. Weather reminds us that beauty also depends on how and when we see. A familiar place can become startling under different light, wind, rain, or season. Sometimes beauty lies as much in the conditions of the moment as in the object before us.

Weather makes that relationship visible. It throws light across one surface and gathers shadow over another; it sharpens distance, erases distance, stains the sky, flattens sound, fills the air with water. Something we have seen a hundred times asks to be seen again.

The oldest poets understood this long before beauty became a philosophical abstraction. Homer’s “rosy-fingered Dawn” appears so often in the Iliad and the Odyssey that modern readers can glide past her, carried along by the phrase’s familiarity. Yet dawn keeps rising over scenes that share very little with one another: departures, mourning, battle, hospitality, homecoming. She colors the harbor and the battlefield alike.

Something is unsettling about that impartiality. Human beings experience catastrophe as singular, while weather recurs. The night in which someone dies ends as morning brightens the sky. Dawn moves according to its own rhythm.

And still we call the dawn beautiful.

That tension has remained with poetry ever since. Beauty consoles partly because it returns, and its return also exposes the natural world’s freedom from human circumstance. The sun rises after the funeral. Snow falls across the battlefield. Spring reaches the grieving house. The world keeps making beautiful things during the hours when beauty feels almost unbearable.

Sappho draws the matter closer, into the body itself. Her surviving poems come to us in fragments, and fragments suit a poetic world built from moonlight, stars, evening, flowers, cool water, perfume, orchard air. In one fragment the moon and Pleiades have set while the night continues; elsewhere evening gathers home what morning scattered. The atmosphere enters the experience of desire until beloved and world begin to share the same air.

Anyone who has stepped outside after hearing extraordinary news knows something of this. The street remains where it was, yet its colors seem newly charged by what has happened. The sky joins the event.

Emotion changes attention, and attention changes the world available to perception. A person in love sees one evening; a person waiting for bad news sees another. The clouds may take the same shape across both skies, yet the hour takes on a different meaning.

Love does something stranger to time. The moments we most want to keep are often the ones when we are most fully present. Attention widens. We hear the rain against the window, feel the air’s temperature on our skin, remember the particular light on a wall, and taste whatever sat between us on the table. A season lived in love can seem larger afterward than whole years around it, because we inhabited so much of it while it was happening. Time continues its ordinary movement, but love gives the moment depth, and depth can feel remarkably like duration.

Lovers have always borrowed the language of seasons because love changes how time feels. Love makes us want the hour to stay, and in wanting it to stay, we see more of what the hour contains. Summer becomes warmer, autumn more fragrant, winter more sharply lit. The beloved seems to enter the weather itself, until remembering the person also means remembering the season in which we loved them.

Shakespeare turns this unstable relationship between world and observer into an argument about beauty itself. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” sounds, after centuries of repetition, like the opening of an uncomplicated compliment. Yet the poem immediately begins dismantling the comparison. Summer has rough winds. It burns too hot. It disappears behind clouds. Most importantly, it ends. The beloved becomes more beautiful as summer proves less able to keep its own beauty. “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date” states the problem plainly: time is already taking away what the season gives. The praise depends upon that pressure. Rough winds, dimmed sunlight, and an ending already folded into the season give “eternal summer” its force.

Shakespeare’s theatre understands the same relationship between atmosphere and human experience, though there weather becomes larger and more physical. Lear standing on the heath needs a storm because ordinary weather would feel too small. When he cries for the winds to “crack your cheeks,” the storm gives his suffering physical scale. Wind, thunder, rain, king: all occupy the same theatrical space until the boundary between inner condition and outer world grows porous.

The stage can make weather bodily. An audience hears the wind and watches a human being stand against it. Metaphor becomes meteorology.

By the Romantic period, poets pushed that relationship between atmosphere and consciousness even further. Wordsworth could build an entire drama from quieter weather: mist, evening light, distance, the land’s changing color. In Tintern Abbey, the landscape gathers itself through season and atmosphere:

“These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
’Mid groves and copses . . .
And wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!”

The scene seems almost to dissolve at its edges. Orchard disappears into grove; green runs into green; smoke rises silently through the trees. Five years separate this landscape from the man seeing it again, so the beauty belongs at once to the summer before him and to the remembered place he has carried through the intervening years. The land remains recognizable, while the consciousness receiving it has changed.

Memory alters weather even after the weather has passed. The light once falling across a landscape survives in the mind alongside later versions of the self. The remembered place becomes an atmosphere one can re-enter, carrying both the earlier scene and the years gathered around it.

Shelley brings that inward weather back to life. In “Ode to the West Wind,” weather tears across the poem. Leaves scatter. Clouds move like loose hair. Waves rise. Autumn becomes an active presence, driving, stripping, carrying, preparing. The wind destroys and preserves in the same motion, pressing dead leaves toward the ground that will feed another season.

Shelley wants his poetry to behave the same way. He asks the wind to scatter his words because weather can travel where the poet’s body ends. What art desires, in that poem, is circulation.

Keats, writing in the same century, finds something quieter in autumn. “To Autumn” lingers.

“Mists and mellow fruitfulness”: the poem begins in an atmosphere already thickened by lateness. Fruit swells. Gourds grow full. Flowers stay open long enough to persuade the bees that warmth might last forever. Autumn possesses its own abundance, and that abundance carries its ending within it. Ripeness points toward what follows ripeness.

By the final stanza the day is “soft-dying,” and the dying light belongs wholly to the beauty.

That is a more radical claim than it may sound. We often link beauty with endurance, imagining that the perfect thing would also be the thing protected from decay. Keats lets beauty depend upon transience. The fruit has reached fullness because it is near falling. The light glows because it shortens. Autumn becomes itself by moving toward winter.

Gerard Manley Hopkins would later find beauty in the visible evidence of variation. “Pied Beauty” praises “dappled things,” and weather may be the world’s great dappler. Clouds break sunlight across fields. Rain deepens the color of stone. Frost draws white borders along branches that seemed unremarkable the day before.

Hopkins watched such changes with extraordinary patience. His journals return to clouds, water, trees, and the action of light with the attention of someone who understood that the world continually changed its pose. A branch catches the sun and loses it; a cloud gathers itself into recognizable form and then begins to break apart. Seeing acquires urgency because the object of attention appears only briefly in that precise form.

Contemporary poet Joseph Massey catches one of these changes at the instant it occurs. In “deep into autumn,” rain crosses almost imperceptibly into snow:

“Trace the seam
where the rain
turned to snow
at the brink
of night—streaks
of white en-
graved in blue.”

The beauty lies in the seam itself, in one kind of weather becoming another while the eye is there to catch it. Massey keeps the change outside us, visible in the air; Emily Dickinson takes the same attentiveness inward and asks what weather does to the mind.

In “There’s a certain Slant of light,” the winter afternoon acts upon consciousness. Dickinson leaves the experience open, allowing the light itself to carry a pressure that ordinary emotional language struggles to contain. The slant matters: the season, the hour, the angle through which illumination enters.

Weather repeatedly performs this work in Dickinson. Snow hushes the world even as it remakes it. Frost turns cold into ornament, laying a fine edge along glass, field, and leaf. A storm deepens the meaning of shelter; the room grows warmer because the wind is outside it, the lamp brighter because darkness has gathered at the windows. Dickinson lets weather pass through the senses before it reaches thought. The atmosphere enters the body, and the body gives it feeling.

A different light can make a different world because it can make a different observer.

By the twentieth century, poets increasingly questioned the meanings tradition had assigned to seasons. T. S. Eliot announces the change in the opening words of The Waste Land. April, which generations of poets had associated with renewal, becomes “the cruellest month.” Spring wakes what winter covered, and awakening carries pain.

The weather continues its ancient rhythms while symbolic meaning shifts around it. Spring can suggest resurrection or disturbance; rain can nourish or overwhelm; snow can soften a landscape or bury it. Poets inherit these associations and turn them until familiar weather reveals another face.

Wallace Stevens takes that freedom almost to its limit. “The Snow Man” asks what winter might look like to a consciousness shaped by winter itself, one capable of seeing bare branches, glittering snow, and cold wind with severe clarity. The poem trains the eye toward the season as it stands before us.

The landscape becomes austere and exact. Stevens disciplines the relationship between mind and weather. The observer must learn to look at the season before assigning it meaning.

Stevens asks the observer to discipline feeling; Ada Limón lets feeling return through the body. In “Dead Stars,” even the trees seem to yield to the season:

“Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.”

The weather gives the landscape a posture, and the human body enters the same cold that bends the trees.

That idea returned to me this morning beneath those turning leaves. I went out expecting a walk and instead found my attention kept being pulled upward. The cold replaced the heat of the previous days and reshaped my thoughts. The wind circled through branches, leaves released themselves, birds moved inside the same currents, and whatever serious matter I had planned to consider kept yielding to the world above me.

The weather had changed, and suddenly the ordinary world claimed more of me.

Rain can do this even more dramatically. It makes visible the air we usually look through. Distance softens. Pavement reflects light upward. Water moves down glass and unsettles everything behind it. Hard edges loosen. A city one knows intimately can look temporarily borrowed from somewhere else.

The street remains the street. The trees, buildings, windows, and curbs stay in place. Yet the conditions of seeing shift, and the eye responds.

A poem often works the same way.

It takes what already exists—a face, a field, a room, an afternoon, a death—and changes the atmosphere around it until the familiar object asks for renewed attention. Language shifts emphasis much as weather does. It brings one detail forward, sends another into shadow, sharpens a distant hill, covers it in mist.

Weather interprets the world through atmosphere. Poets return to it because beauty often gathers where object, observer, and hour meet. The same tree under another sky may recede into the ordinary, while the memory of its earlier beauty remains intact. It belonged to a particular light, a particular season, a particular act of seeing.

We often resist that conclusion because we tie permanence closely to value. If something matters, we want to keep it. If something is beautiful, we want to preserve it. Yet many of the experiences we call beautiful draw their force from passing conditions: evening light withdrawing from a room, snow before the first footprints, leaves turning for a few weeks before the branches empty.

Disappearance enters the beauty itself. We feel the evening deepen because the light is already leaving; frost catches the eye because morning will erase it; autumn burns brightest at the edge of winter. The passing is part of what sharpens our attention.

Poetry works under the same pressure. Summer ends. Frost melts when morning warms. A color in the sky lasts only a few minutes. The poem cannot keep the weather in place, but it can preserve the act of seeing: the mind meeting the world so intensely that the moment leaves a form behind. What vanishes in time can remain vivid in language, held not as the thing itself but as the trace of attention it once commanded.

When Shakespeare gives the beloved an “eternal summer,” the season continues toward autumn. The beloved remains mortal. What survives is the seeing. The same is true of Homer’s dawn, Sappho’s moon, Keats’s autumn, Dickinson’s winter light. The weather in each poem passed centuries ago, or lives within the poem as an imagined hour, yet the attention remains available to us. We can enter it. The poem teaches the eye where another eye once looked.

This morning’s cold will pass too. The leaves will fall. The smell that seemed half earth and half marshmallow will leave with the season, and memory will gradually alter the precise feel of the air against my face. What remains is the habit the morning briefly restored: looking closely enough to feel the world changing as I moved through it.

Auden writes:

“Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show”