Life & Wisdom Quote by E. E. Cummings

Cummings gives you a landscape after the drama has already happened: not rain falling, not leaves turning, but the stripped-down aftermath. The sentence keeps repeating "blown... away" like a gust that won’t stop worrying the same thought. It’s insistently cumulative, almost childish in its simplicity, and that’s the trick: the diction is plain, the feeling isn’t. By the time we reach "and the trees stand", the line lands like a moral verdict. Everything expendable is gone; what remains is endurance, but not the triumphant kind. More like: you’re still here. Now what?

The pivot to "I think" shrinks the scene from weather report to confession. Cummings’ speaker isn’t merely observing autumn; he’s recognizing it as a pattern he can’t unlearn. "I too" quietly aligns him with the trees - upright, surviving, maybe emptied out. The final phrase, "known autumn too long", turns a season into a biography. Autumn becomes prolonged exposure: to loss, to change you can predict but can’t prevent, to the fatigue of repeated endings. There’s even a sly double meaning in "known" - familiarity as intimacy, and as the kind of knowledge that ages you.

Context matters: Cummings wrote with modernist compression and an eye for how small, ordinary images can carry psychic weight. Here, nature isn’t pastoral comfort; it’s a mirror held up after the storm, showing a self that’s learned resilience and resents the lesson.