Mr. Bryant's Golden Rod - Thoughts on William Bryant, Emily Dickinson and Clarity

I’m sitting under the porch in the backyard with the rain doing that soft drumroll on the roof.  Today I found out that Emily Dickinson used to read this poem. In her poem, Besides Autumn the poets sing, Mr. Bryant’s ‘Golden Rod’ is a reference to William Bryant’s poem The Death of the Flowers. Bryant (1794–1878), the big Romantic editor-poet of New York, writes in long, rivered lines; Emily (1830–1886), in Amherst, writes like lightning in a jar. Different rhythms, same season. Here is the complete poem by Bryant: 

THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS
- William Bryant

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread.
The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.

Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood
In brighter light, and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race, of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.

The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,
And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sun-flower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.

And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,[Page 106]
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;
When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill,
The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.

And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,
The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side:
In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:
Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.


Reading both Emily's poem and Bryant's poem together, your take lands cleanly for me: Emily’s poem really does read like a prayer—“let me keep a pocket of summer in my winter.” She stands on the hinge of the year with a small ask: a few warm mornings, a little stored sun. Bryant’s poem, meanwhile, slowly tilts from field to memory—flowers to a “fair meek blossom” who died. The turn is gentle and devastating. His autumn isn’t just scenery; it’s the liturgy for grief.

I love how both poems personify the weather into meaning. Emily’s autumn is precise and almost mischievous—“a few prosaic Days”—as if she’s negotiating with time. Bryant’s autumn is the old friend who teaches you the word “tender” by breaking it in your hands. In his best metaphors—flowers as a “beauteous sisterhood,” the wind that “searches” and “sighs,” frost falling “as the plague on men”—he’s saying what can’t be said directly: what happens to petals happens to us.

And here we are, the 21st-century readers on wet patio chairs, listening to this cross-century conversation. Emily hears Bryant and winks; Bryant hears the season and answers back. That’s how poets talk across time and place—through weather reports that are really heart reports.

But since we’re being honest with the rain, I also feel a little bad for fall. Everybody uses it. Emily asks it to warehouse warmth for winter. Bryant turns it into an elegy machine. We load it with endings and metaphors until the trees can barely hold their own names. Maybe we owe fall something back—more than our symbolism.

So here’s my own small addition at the end of the page: before we make autumn carry our prayers and our losses, let’s love it for itself—the smoky light on the rill, the buckled gold of the leaves, the way the air fits the skin just right. Let fall be not only a bridge to winter or a curtain call for summer, not only the season we borrow for memory, but a season we keep—unburdened, briefly, simply loved. It is not hot, not cold. It is clear. Which is true about spring too, but then it doesn't have any pollen. It is really the best season for clarity. 

I am sure someone else will continue from where I left. 



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