"And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, and the year smiles as it draws near its death"
About this Quote
The phrase “meek suns grow brief” doubles down with a deliberately compressed rhythm. Meekness becomes duration; gentleness is measured in daylight minutes. Bryant isn’t describing weather as background scenery, he’s moralizing time itself. That’s classic early American Romanticism: the landscape as a spiritual instrument, tuned to remind the reader that all power wanes. The line’s internal echo (“meek...meek”) also reads like a private insistence, as if the speaker is talking himself into acceptance.
Then comes the slyest move: “the year smiles as it draws near its death.” Personification could have been sentimental; Bryant makes it unsettling. A smile at the approach of death isn’t happiness, it’s composure. It implies an ethic of graceful ending, a culture trained to see mortality as natural order rather than scandal. Written in a 19th-century Protestant milieu that prized sober reflection, the image functions like a secular sermon: look at the calendar, and learn how to die.
The subtext isn’t despair. It’s discipline - an attempt to domesticate dread by giving it a beautiful face.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life (William C. Bryant, 1885)
Evidence: And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, And the year smiles as it draws near its death. (Page 303 ("OCTOBER. A SONNET.")). The lines are from William Cullen Bryant’s poem/sonnet usually titled "October" (often printed as "October. A Sonnet."). This Gutenberg edition (1885 anthology) reliably preserves the text, but it is NOT the primary/first publication. I was able to verify the poem text itself in multiple places (e.g., Wikisource transcription of "October (Bryant)"). However, I was NOT able (from the sources retrieved in this search session) to confirm the poem’s *first* publication venue/date (e.g., a specific magazine issue or Bryant’s earliest collected edition) with a scan of the original publication. One common secondary claim (including an auction listing) asserts it was "written 1826, published 1840," but that is not a primary bibliographic record and may be incorrect without corroboration from an authoritative bibliography or a scanned 1840 source. Other candidates (1) The Complete Poems of William Cullen Bryant (William Cullen Bryant, 1894) compilation95.0% William Cullen Bryant Harry C. Edwards. OCTOBER . That glimmering curve of tender rays Just planted in the sky ... An... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Bryant, William C. (2026, February 21). And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, and the year smiles as it draws near its death. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-suns-grow-meek-and-the-meek-suns-grow-brief-122198/
Chicago Style
Bryant, William C. "And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, and the year smiles as it draws near its death." FixQuotes. February 21, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-suns-grow-meek-and-the-meek-suns-grow-brief-122198/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, and the year smiles as it draws near its death." FixQuotes, 21 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-suns-grow-meek-and-the-meek-suns-grow-brief-122198/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2026.
